Hunter's Moon
by Fallarin
Summary: Traveling to a competition in Ulan Bator across the Gobi desert, a martial artist must fight for her life when insectoid black serpents attack out of a sandstorm. After surviving one battle, she realizes she is not the only combatant.
1. Rebel

**HUNTER'S MOON**

by Fallarin

An Alien v. Predator fanfic

_Author's disclaimer: I do not own the copyrights, intellectual or otherwise, to either the Alien or Predator franchises. This piece is written purely for self-indulgence, and published here in the hopes of entertaining others with similar interests. Unless some bigwig at Fox stumbles across this story and loves it so much that he (or she) wishes to contract me to write professionally for the franchise, I have not and will not make any money from, nor attempt to sell, my creative writing about AVP. Rating is T for violence at the time of initial publication, but may incur a stronger rating in later chapters. Oh, and that whole thing about a Fox executive somehow finding me is as big a fantasy as this story. Without further ado, enjoy!_

**Chapter 1 - Rebel**

The wind had carved tortured patterns into the vast barren plain of rock and sand: twisted streaks of brown, ochre, and black. The small car that bumped and rattled across the old road was a bright splash of robin's-egg blue in that bleak and unforgiving landscape. It was the only thing that moved except the wind.

"The winds can get quite fierce here," the driver said in heavily-accented English to his silent companion. They were a long way out from Beijing, and although they had crossed into Mongolia more than two hours before, they had longer still to go before they reached Ulan Bator. The driver had heard that Americans liked to talk, but the woman in the passenger seat of his old car had not spoken since she'd muttered an obscenity at the Chinese border guard who had lingered too long over her passport and travel papers.

"In the spring," the driver continued, eyes on the ruts ahead, "The sandstorms come. They make the desert very dangerous." He drove in the center of the road, avoiding the worst of the drifts that had blown onto the shoulders. The car's heater chugged and wheezed to keep them warm. The Gobi is a cold desert.

The girl's face, pale and long beneath dark hair, turned to look at the driver. "It's May," she said. Her face showed disbelief.

Yetko, the driver, bared crooked teeth and laughed. A gust of wind pounded the side of the car as it bumped along. The girl shook back her long hair and pushed her shoulders deeper into the seat, and said nothing. Yetko grimaced. It was their second day of travel, with two more ahead of them. This woman was paying him well to drive her to the capital of his country, but it would be a dull journey if he couldn't get her to talk.

The American, Siaran Moss, closed her eyes. She could still feel the car shudder when the wind slapped at it, angry cat's paws of air-tossed sand. It hissed and pattered against the windows, louder now that she was not using her eyes. She let her thoughts drift with the motion of the car.

In less than a week, the Tae Kwon Do World Championships would be held in Ulan Bator. Eight days ago, Siaran had arrived in Beijing, planning to spend the extra time before the tournament as a tourist in the country that had birthed martial arts. She had not been allowed to do so. One visit, observed and documented, to a clandestine Buddhist temple, and suddenly she couldn't go anywhere. She had arranged travel to the Shaolin Temple before she left the States. Its walls had seen the first of the warrior monks; it was the one place Siaran most wanted to see before competing for the most prestigious title in Tae Kwon Do.

The Chinese government had revoked her travel privileges, had made it clear that the only road in China that she was welcome to take was the one leading out of it. North, in her case, through one of the most inhospitable regions on the planet: the Gobi desert, following the unpaved road that was the only direct overland route to Ulan Bator.

A stillness outside made Siaran open her eyes. Straightening in the plastic seat, she frowned out at the desert. Yetko's car was still moving, but the wind had stopped. The sun was brassy and distant, low on the western horizon beneath a high gray sky. A shiver, small, just a frisson along the nerves, caught her. She turned her head, about to ask Yetko whether there was some village or settlement where he planned to stop for the night, and found him watching her. Before she could speak, he asked, "Why do you hate the Chinese so much?"

It was his first impolite question, as he saw it. He asked it mostly to see how she would react. Yetko knew where Siaran was heading and why; he knew she had had some trouble with the Ministry of the Interior over travel papers. Yetko thought she should not have been surprised by that. In China these days, no one was permitted to go where he pleased. He supposed Siaran was used to more license in the United States, and was beginning to think, based on limited experience, that Americans took too much for granted.

So Siaran's answer surprised him. "Because they run over unarmed people in _tanks_." She spat the last word, then pulled her long dark hair back from her face and began to plait it from the base of her neck, fingers working violently. "They do that, and then they just go on. No remorse. No reaction to public outcry. Not even compensation for the families of the people they killed."

Yetko blinked. She looked too young to remember Tianenmen Square with such wrath.

"I was nine years old," Siaran said unexpectedly, making Yetko blink again at this anticipation of his unasked question. "My parents didn't try to shelter me from what I saw on the news." She was quiet then for so long that Yetko wondered if she'd fallen asleep. The light was bad and he needed to watch the road. Then, in a slow voice empty of emotion, Siaran spoke again. "They were doctors." He heard her turn her head toward him. "My parents. They were killed six years after Tianenmen Square, in the border fighting between Zimbabwe and Mozambique." Audibly, she swallowed. "They were training medical staff at a temporary camp in the jungle. They had no weapons."

Yetko, listening, hardly breathing, had slowed the car to a crawl. "The soldiers from Zimbabwe sent their ears and tongues to the American embassy." Her hand flashed out, a pale knife edge in the twilight gloom, and thumped the dash. There was no self-pity on her face.

After a pause, Yetko said, "I think your parents taught you as best they could. You are a very self-sufficient young lady." Siaran looked out the side window and did not respond. "The Gobi is also merciless." He shook his head. "Even the great Khan did not stray too far inside it. And we have stories, eh? Old tales, that sometimes there are things in the sandstorms. Things with claws and teeth, that come with the snow and sand and kill anything they find." Yetko laughed shortly. "But just stories, Ms. Moss! We are here, eh? We survive. If you know the desert, it will not harm you. And that makes it different from a man."

Yetko had intended to make her feel better with this piece of wisdom, but Siaran was no longer listening. On the eastern horizon, she saw a boiling mass of black cloud, darker than the darkening sand and sky. It grew as she watched, coming closer, and she thought she heard a roar like distant thunder. Taking a breath, she pressed her palm flat against the window. "Yetko," she said, "What's that?"

Yetko looked, and stopped the car with a jerk. He reversed across the road and lined up the car with its nose pointing west, so that the mass of darkness was now behind them. "Sandstorm," he said flatly. "Lock your door, please, Ms. Moss. Best thing to do is sit tight until it's over." He tried to smile. "Don't be afraid. Sandstorms happen here all the time." He set the parking brake and turned off the engine. In spite of his words, his breathing was harsh and quick. Siaran, determined not to panic, slowed her own breathing, pulling air deep into her belly and relaxing her shoulders. The simple exercise helped keep her mind clear.

There was sweat on Yetko's face, and he muttered something in his own language. Maybe this was a bigger sandstorm than he had expected. Siaran could feel the car shake, could hear the distant roar grow louder. The temperature in the car had dropped sharply without the heater on. A moment later, a high shrieking of wind overlaid the roar of sand and earth. Siaran fought down the urge to break out of the car and run. That was the hindbrain talking, the primitive ape who shivered before the fury of the storm and sought to go to ground.

The roaring grew, and with it came the spitting hiss of sand driving horizontally against the car. The ground shook, and the car's body trembled and groaned on its springs. Yetko yelled something; Siaran looked at him and saw only the whites of his eyes before the darkness overtook them. Her hands groped for something to hold onto, something solid and reassuring in the roaring, screaming dark, and found only empty air.

The storm hit.


	2. Monsters in the Dark

**Chapter 2 - Monsters in the Dark**

A gale force of wind, sand, and snow slammed into the little blue car, which rocked briefly up onto its front wheels before bouncing heavily down again. Mouth and eyes wide, Siaran braced herself against the dash and roof. The rear window glass cracked and shattered, and the wind came in, cold from the mountains, scoured with sand. The car shuddered and began to slide as sand built under the tires.

Siaran couldn't see, couldn't breathe, could only hear the terrible noises of the storm. She curled into a ball, feet on the gritty seat and knees jammed against the dashboard. She burrowed her face into her shirt, working the collar up over her mouth and nose to help her breathe. Huddled like that, eyes squeezed shut, Siaran still saw the flash of light. A cold light, greeny-blue, erupting from the bowels of the desert and sending tortured shadows dancing through the storm.

Startled, Siaran slitted her eyes open, the afterimage of the flash still dazzling her retinas. Looking left, she saw Yetko staring ahead through the windshield. Veins and knotted sinews stood out in his neck, and his hands scrabbled at the door handle. There was no shred of sanity in his eyes.

"What are you doing?" Siaran shouted. "You said to stay in the car!" Her voice was thin and faint in her ears. Her strong fingers found his shoulder and he yelled, swatting her hands away and still staring outside at something she couldn't see. Then he was gone through the open door and Siaran was alone. There came after a moment a thin high screaming of something in mortal agony, a sliver of sound above the howling of the wind. Siaran sat straight up, head slamming into the roof of the car. She stared out at the dark, and her eyes stung from tiny whips of sand but she didn't dare blink. For the space of several heartbeats, the storm raged on without interruption.

There was another flash of light, to the south, and a heavy _whump_ of concussed air rocked the car, harder than the storm had. The little car shuddered and slid a few more feet, and then Siaran, staring southwest through the glass at the lit-up devils of snow and sand, was looking at something else.

A serpentlike body that shone black in the strange light, with spidery limbs and a whiplike tail tipped with a sharp, tapering point. An elongated, eyeless skull. It was something out of a nightmare, running low to the ground, now obscured by a whirl of sand, now visibly lit by the strange light source. Fighting the wind. Coming closer.

The thing sprang onto the hood of the car and hissed, baring translucent fangs at Siaran. It raked a clawed forefoot across the windshield and she heard its nails shriek against the glass. It drew back to gather itself, and Siaran knew it was going to use that skull as a battering ram to break in. She was dead if she didn't do something, and there was no time to think. Blind grasping panic rushed over her, the sort of fear that numbs the mind and freezes the limbs and makes the rabbit wait, paralyzed, while the weasel dances in for the kill.

What saved her was discipline and muscle memory, and her body reacted without her mind giving it any signal at all.

The serpent-thing's skull smashed the safety glass, but Siaran was alread rolling, strong legs pushing off the seat and through the open driver's side door, head cradled between her elbows. She hit the soft sand and came up, staggering but on her feet. The monster had thrust itself into the car and was trapped there; the big, sinuous body was not meant to fit or move in the cramped interior. With a squeal of rage, it began to thrash, tearing at the seats and the dash, eyeless head turning uncannily to follow Siaran.

It wouldn't be trapped for long. Still no time to think. Siaran was running on the adrenaline burst of flight-or-flight reflex, and on thirteen years of repetition drilled over and over until reaction was a thing of timing and quickness. Bent against the wind, she pulled herself to the rear of the car and wrenched open the battered trunk, where Yetko had stored her gear for the journey. The staff - her hands groped blindly, found it, wrapped around it, pulled it free.

Six feet of hardened ash, dense and purposely heavy for building wrist and forearm strength. Siaran turned, hands automatically finding the proper grip: overhanded, shoulder width apart, left end raised at eye level. She took two running steps toward the open driver's door of the car with the wind behind her, and reversed the staff in a humming arc just as the dragonlike monster began to emerge. Her right arm reached overhead and she bent her right leg as she swung, sliding the left straight out in front and dropping down into a half-split with her strike in order to bring her body weight to bear on the impact.

The heavy staff struck the serpent at the point where its neck met its body. The thing's exoskeleton cracked and it fell hard to the sand. Yellow ichor dripped from the crack, and the sand smoked where it fell. Siaran didn't wait for it to get up again. Using the blunt end of the staff, she smashed the thing's head once, twice, again, again, until the beast screeched in pain and rage and suddenly the hard chitin cracked in a sluggish splash of yellow blood. Some of it spattered the staff, and when Siaran slammed the blunt end into the side of the beast's jaw, the wood splintered and gave way, eaten through by the corrosive blood.

That put a thought into her head at last, and she paused. She couldn't let the thing bleed on her; not if its blood could eat through pressed and treated wood in just a few seconds. Siaran drove the broken end of the staff deep into the sand and stepped back warily. The serpent lay before her, its skull cracked and mangled in a grisly mash of black chitin, thick ichor, and gobbets of greenish flesh. As she watched, it opened its jaws slowly and a second, smaller, fanged mouth extended beyond the first set of teeth. Siaran snapped up the broken staff and took another step back, but the weird inner mouth just opened and closed feebly, once. The body gave a great shudder, and was still.

Sensation returned in a rush. She had been so focused on the battle, on the simple act of survival, that Siaran hadn't noticed the storm had nearly passed over. The wind still blew strongly, forcing stinging spurts of sand ahead of it, but it was no longer a raging force to blind and kill. Also, she realized that she was shaking. Her knees gave way and Siaran sank down, gripping her staff for support. She had lost her driver and killed a creature that seemed more likely spawned by nightmare than by any earthly animal. She was confused and lost and alone, probably suffering from the onset of shock.

Hysterical laughter bubbled up in her throat as the force of her situation struck her. Siaran bit her tongue as hard as she could. The sudden pain shocked her back to a more sober state of mind. That was good. If she started laughing now, she might not be able to stop.

First things first, then. She had to find Yetko, if he was still alive. She pulled herself upright again and moved to stand above the thing she had killed. Had she really? Somehow, in the aftermath, it didn't seem possible. She had trained half her life to defend herself against attack, always with the unproven belief that she would respond properly in a real combat situation. Not just a tough opponent on the sparring floor, where both fighters wore protective padding and were governed by certain rules. She had the belief, but not the knowledge.

Well, she had really been tested now, and she knew. The carcass was still there. The sand was beginning to cover it, but its weird shape, both insectoid and serpentine, was plain. So was its long eyeless head, and the razor teeth. The sand where the blood had pooled was black and twisted. No creature Siaran had ever heard of looked anything like this. But here it was, and no time to waste speculating about its origins. Now was the time for survival, for figuring out what to do next.

The car was a mess. The seats and dash were clawed open; stuffing and tangles of colored wires tumbled and mixed with drifts of sand. The steering column had been torn off. Siaran stared at the wreck, eyes seeing, mind processing. The most unbelievable thing, she thought disconnectedly, was that she had managed to kill with a wooden stick a creature strong enough to snap off a car's steering shaft. And there wasn't a mark on her.

An icy feeling of unreality clawed up her spine as Siaran turned from the savaged car. Calling Yetko's name, she moved off in the direction the car's nose was pointing. West, she thought, although the car had shifted in the storm and she couldn't be sure.

A dozen or so steps, then her foot kicked something solid but yielding, buried in the sand. Siaran's breath hitched. "Yetko?" she whispered, and abandoning her staff, she knelt to brush away the sand. Clothing, hair, skin, the wetness of blood, and a face. Or what was left of one.

Trembling, Siaran turned away from the sight. Yetko was dead. He was dead, and she was alone in a hostile unfamiliar desert with no transportation, no food, no one around for hundreds of miles except the dead serpent thing back by the car. Things in sandstorms, Yetko had said, and he'd been right. Things with claws and teeth.

"The legends were true, Yetko," Siaran murmured, voice lost in the sporadic rushes of wind and sand. "I'm sorry."

She sat there with her head bowed, unable to think what to do next, mind numb with shock. After a time, light caught at the edge of her vision and she looked up to see a huge full moon rising above the high plateaus in the east. Light. She'd forgotten about the lights during the storm, had forgotten it had been sunset when the storm struck. Now here was the moon to lift the darkness with its cold light.

There was a flicker of movement. Siaran blinked sand out of her eyes and saw them. Leaping and bounding over the vast tilted plain of the Gobi, the moonlight sliding off wicked sinuous black bodies. More of the serpents - six, ten, a dozen, she couldn't count them - scudding across the sand toward her. They raised their heads as they scented her, and shrieked in anticipation of the kill.


	3. Deus Ex

_Author's Note: This chapter's a long one. Not too fond of those; I prefer the iceberg approach and will endeavor to keep them shorter. There didn't seem a plausible way to break this into two chapters, though, so I hope it isn't too much of a strain to get through. _

_I am grateful to tain89 for taking the time to give positive reviews and encouragement. It's kept the fire lit and the juices flowing. Thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy the story._

_The author would care to read any and all reviews. Very much. Criticism is as welcome as praise provided it is constructive. (Of course, if the story sucks and should die a quick death, let me know before I torture you too much further.) Whether you have likes, dislikes, suggestions, corrections, or wishlists, I want to hear about them. Thanks for reading; on with the show!_

* * *

**Chapter 3 – Deus Ex**

Even at the end, when it seems everything has been taken away, there is still a choice. Die submissive, helpless with fear, screaming. Like Yetko had. Like her parents had. Or die fighting, striving to take at least one of those monsters with her into the dark. Those were Siaran's choices. Strange, to realize in the last few moments of breath and heartbeat, that she could still choose.

Back to the car's open trunk, then. Hurry. Two more weapons waited there, zipped into padded travel cases, combat quality in compliance with WTF rules. Siaran opened both cases, tucked the sheathed dagger into the back of her jeans, and took up the _kali_. The dagger was better for ripping and slicing, but at such close range against these things and their acidic blood, using it might harm her as much as them.

_Kali_ were twin sticks of fire-hardened bamboo, resilient and strong, each about three feet long. A fighter skilled in their use could simultaneously create a moving wall of defense and issue strikes to face, neck, and joints. They could incapacitate and even kill a man. Given Siaran's lack of knowledge of the serpents' vital striking points, she would have to hope she'd get as lucky with the _kali_ as she had with her staff.

The pack spread out to flank her as they neared the sand-covered road. The biggest of them came on without hesitation, while the rest hung back for now. Allowing their leader its fun. Dripping jaws hissed cold death, and Siaran was more afraid than she had ever been. She did not want to die.

She also knew that fear wouldn't help her. She pushed it deep down and focused with the awful concentration of which a trained fighter is capable on the movements of the lead serpent, trying to spot weakness she could use against it. "Move!" she shouted at herself, and crossed the _kali_ over her head, pushed her shoulders forward, and ran to meet her killers head on.

Her first strike broke the small bones of the big serpent's extra mouth when it extended, quick but careless, to snap at the front of her skull in an attempt to end the game early. Instead, it found searing pain. It reared back with a squeal, exposing its midsection while it pawed at its jaws, trying to dislodge the useless inner mouth. This small morsel fought back; it inflicted pain, and now the leader must regain the use of its teeth quickly or risk being torn to pieces by its fellows for being unable to take its prey.

Siaran planted her right foot on hard sand, bunching her muscles to leap. Her left foot landed, splayed to the outside, and she pushed off it, tucking the left foot underneath her and turning sideways with her straight right leg leading the jump, toes pulled back so that the heel of her steel-shanked hiking boot struck the serpent in the center of its narrow bony chest. Already overbalanced, it toppled backward, flailing the long, deadly tail.

Momentum sent her crashing on top of the felled monster, and Siaran scrambled off as fast as she could, rolling out of reach of its claws and teeth. The spearhead tail punched into the sand inches from her head and she slashed at it with the _kali_, doing no visible damage. She rolled again, trying to get away from the tail before it impaled her. The eerie shrieks of the things were all around her now. To this point, she had managed to stay alive because the beasts had underestimated an easy kill; she was fast and she could hit hard, and she had used that to her advantage. But the element of surprise no longer existed. On hands and knees, Siaran felt displacement in the air and looked up. She saw the taloned forearm of the lead serpent flash in the moonlight as it swept toward the back of her neck for the death-stroke, and knew it was almost the end.

With no time to dodge the blow, she sank her head between her shoulders and tightened all the muscles in her upper back. Claws ripped at ridges of muscle instead of spinal cord, cutting deep before pulling away. As Siaran struggled to get up, the serpent's full weight crashed onto her back. She hit the ground hard, the breath whooshing from her lungs. Her teeth clicked together when her chin hit, and she tasted blood. The _kali _in her left hand came loose and rolled away across the sand.

The pressure lifted as the thing raised itself and prepared for the kill. With a tremendous effort, Siaran rolled onto her back and hammered blindly at the serpent that thrashed and snapped above her. The _kali _connected twice before crushing jaws caught and snapped it. Siaran snarled a wordless bloody cry of anger that she should die here, now, like this. She reached up to grab the serpent under the jaw and along its spiny shoulder ridges. Her fingers were wet with sweat or blood and her grip kept slipping as she fought to control the thing's head. The pain in her shoulders made her arms weak and she fought that too, tightening her hold in a blind red rage, determined not to die first.

The serpent screamed in frustration. Impatient for the kill, another of the fangy horrors rammed sideways into Siaran's adversary. She lost hold of it as the two demonic creatures snapped at each other, temporarily forgetting her in their quarrel. In desperation, she arched her back and felt behind her for the knife she'd stuck in the waistband of her jeans. It was still there.

Forget preserving her skin against acid blood, she thought wildly as she pulled it free. As soon as the rest of those things got tired of waiting—what _were_ they waiting for?—and jumped her, she was dead anyway. She unsheathed the dagger and drew her arm back, aiming at the side of the nearest serpent's skull, just behind and above the jaw. Her aim had to be perfect. Tightening her arm ruthlessly against the pain in her shoulders, Siaran struck.

The serpent combusted in a burst of blue light so bright that it blinded her. The shock wave from the explosion tossed the pack of serpents, Siaran with them, into the air like so many wind-scattered leaves. She hit the ground hard a second later. Bright spots on her vision flickered, went to black, and returned in the space of seconds. She lay where she fell, mentally cataloging limbs and digits to be sure they were all still there. They were. She felt nauseous and her head rang from the impact of whatever had just blown the serpents to oblivion, but she was alive and whole and nothing was currently trying to kill her.

So she sat up, clutching her head briefly while the world tumbled and swam and finally decided to settle down. Pulling her legs under her, she rose to a crouch, hands splayed out on the sand to steady herself. Hopeful that the world would go on being stable and horizontal, she risked a look up along the desert plain.

And gasped.

She was looking at a battle.

The serpents, those still able to fight, had moved further along, past the wreck of Yetko's car, some fifty yards distant. The full moon was behind Siaran. By its light, she could see the serpents writhing in a frenzy as they attacked a pair of—samurai?

With careful fingers, Siaran felt all over her skull for soft spots or cracking, trying to ascertain whether she'd sustained a concussion and was hallucinating now. But when she looked again, the new arrivals still looked like samurai. They wore overlapping jointed armor, like a lobster's tail, on their shoulders, chests, arms, and legs. Their faces were masked by fierce-looking metal helms, and they had beaded headdresses of long braids that whipped and flowed with their movements. They fought in silence, and when they moved—

Siaran was afraid. She was torn and bleeding, stranded and hunted by fierce eyeless things she couldn't hope to fight. Even so, the warriors stopped her breath and held her staring. When they moved, they were _beautiful_.

A martial artist, when he moves through the ritual choreography of a combat form, differs from a dancer in one important respect. For the dancer, the visual effect is uppermost: his clothing is featherlight and hugs the strong clean line of limb and muscle. Every arch, every leap, every graceful sweep of the arms adds power and allure to the movement of the dance. A dancer's body is as much a work of art as is the music she moves to.

It is never intended to be so in the martial arts, which have deep roots in humility, and which depend largely upon deception when facing an unquantified opponent. Clothing is loose-fitting for a more vital purpose than simply providing the ability to move freely. Lycra allows one to move freely, too. But a martial artist's uniform is loose and simple and covers the body from neck to wrist to ankle. It disguises the strength of the body, not celebrates it. In so doing, it deceives the eye so that the fast snap of a kick or punch is unanticipated, unblocked, and ultimately victorious. Put a martial artist into dancer's clothing and at once her movements are revealed, as beautiful as they are powerful. But their effectiveness is largely lost with their exposure.

The tall warriors who had appeared suddenly in the southwest, and who Siaran was sure had caused the blue-white explosion that had saved her life, moved the way a world-class martial artist longs to move. But they looked like dancers, and they were damned effective.

It wasn't possible. It wasn't...human...to move like that. Siaran knew it better than most, and she couldn't stop watching.

Their speed belying their size and the weight of their armor, the two warriors leapt and whirled, guarding each other's backs while remaining solidly on the offensive. Six or seven of the serpents faced them. In their initial rush to kill her, Siaran had grudgingly admired their speed and agility. They had seemed the perfect hunters with their tough carapaces, their teeth and claws and deadly tails. But the deadly ballet of the two warriors made her think she'd been a little hasty in that declaration. _Here_ were the perfect hunters, the perfect predators. They fought with a variety of weapons and always danced out of reach of claw or tail, riposting so fast it was impossible to tell how they were able to shift their balance that quickly.

Siaran crept closer, fascination overriding all the instincts that yammered at her to run while she had the chance. Where could she go? She had found herself unexpectedly alive, but that didn't change the fact that she was stranded in the middle of the Gobi. Five yards closer. Ten. She could see more clearly now the weapons that the pair of predator-warriors used. All of them were both familiar and strange: a curved and jointed double blade that could extend or retract over the back of the fist, like a collapsible knife that one never had to worry about dropping. A wicked throwing disc with curved blades that behaved strangely in the air, like a boomerang, and returned to the thrower's hand. A double-ended spear with wicked blades that seemed to be impervious to the serpents' corrosive blood.

A brief, irrational surge of envy made Siaran smile grimly. What she wouldn't have given to have any of those weapons when she'd charged the pack alone.

Another of the serpents died, impaled on a predator's spear. He—it had to be a he; the physiology was all wrong for a woman—yanked the spear out again and whipped around, braids flying, to decapitate another of the monsters with an upward slice of the bladed disc in his left hand. It was all done with casual grace and blinding speed. Siaran was aware that her own efforts must have looked like weak little stumbles by comparison. Maybe it was her mind cracking under the strain, but some part of her wished she could move and fight like those two warriors.

Then she noticed that each of them wore a small cannon in mounts over their left shoulder. Despite the greater numbers of the lethal serpents, both cannon were dormant, pointing their sophisticated-looking muzzles harmlessly at the sky.

Siaran went cold. They weren't fighting in self-defense. Those cannon had to be the weapons they'd used to cause the explosion that had fried one serpent and gotten the attention of the rest. Hell, that had to be the blue light she'd seen during the sandstorm, too. The predators must have been fighting more of the serpents this whole time, far enough away that Siaran hadn't seen or heard them during the distraction of her own battles.

Whatever the case, it was clear that the pair of warriors meant to kill with their primitive weapons if they could, not with the more advanced technology on their backs. They enjoyed the fighting. Maybe she and Yetko had just gotten in the way of their hunt as they tracked the serpents through the storm. Which begged the question: what would they do to her, if they found her alive? Siaran stopped moving forward but continued to watch. She was reluctant to run, especially because she had no hope of escape and nowhere to hide. The alternative might be even worse, but at least, again, she wouldn't die running away.

The first predator, who had dispatched the two serpents so quickly, was now fighting two more. He fended off their rushes with parries and attacks of his spear that made Siaran's staff work look amateur. His companion felled the beast he'd been fighting, and turned to help.

He didn't make a sound as the black spear of a serpent's tail thrust through his neck, protruding a foot out of the front of his throat. The gout of blood that followed glowed green against his armor, brighter than the serpents' thick ichor, and Siaran knew with finality that the predators were no more human than the serpents they hunted. And human or not, they could die.

She watched, sanity balanced on a knife blade, as the black demon shook the limp form of its hunter and screamed in triumph. It flung the body away and turned with a howl toward the other predator. By then Siaran was moving, all action and hot anger and sharp focus, toward the battle. Maybe she had gone over the edge, for certainly if there was a time to start running away, this was it—and here she was going in the wrong direction. Or maybe it was the opposite, that she had looked down the dark road to madness before, with the death of her parents. Not taking that road once gave her the strength to resist it now, so instead of fleeing, she turned to help the only thing that stood between her and being ripped apart by monsters.

She turned to help the predator.

Logic was working somewhere, dim and distant. He was alone and outnumbered by creatures that would kill him, and her, if they could. That was a given. Whether the predator would kill Siaran was not a given. It was uncertain, and her situation was desperate enough that she could take heart in uncertainty. The fact of his humanity, or rather lack of it, came second to survival and could be dealt with if, and only if, Siaran could survive the serpents. Fighting alongside a more skilled and capable warrior than herself seemed to hold the best odds of that.

Besides, he and his comrade had saved her life, even if it was by accident. Siaran believed in and trained by an ancient code of honor, and that code mandated that she had a debt to repay.

She paused to pick up the single _kali_ lying nearby, where the explosion had thrown it. Her knife was not in sight and she couldn't waste time looking for it. She picked up speed, running, sprinting, knees lifting, arms driving her forward. The three surviving serpents were advancing on the lone warrior from the front and both sides. He crouched balanced in a fighting stance, spear ready. His shoulder gun was extended now, but he couldn't possibly hit all three opponents before going down. The demons twitched their tails and hissed. Their hindquarters shifted in dainty movements, back and forth, and they tore the sand with their claws, going through the ritual of open challenge.

They pounced. The cannon fired once, a pounding boom, a burst of blue plasma. Siaran ducked her head but was still briefly blinded by the flash. She heard a truncated scream and the sizzle of serpent ichor hitting the sand. Then she slammed at full speed into a hard, bony body, knocking it away from the predator pinned beneath it and rolling with it across the sand.

It flailed, shrieking and snapping, strong beyond belief. Claws grazed Siaran's hip, opening a flesh bloom of agony to go with her throbbing shoulders. She struck with her little stick at anything she could reach, and did her best to dodge the vicious double mouth as the demon lunged at her again and again. The plasma cannon boomed again as Siaran and the serpent fetched up against the cold armor of the fallen warrior's body. His spear was there, next to his outstretched hand. Siaran dropped the _kali _and grabbed the spear, dug her heels into the sand, and lunged backward, away from the serpent. It righted itself with a furious lash of its tail and sprang after her at once.

She was ready. "Come on, bitch," Siaran told it, and bared her own bloody teeth. She drove the point of the spear into the center of its elongated skull before its hindquarters left the ground. Then she let go and danced backward from the impaled, dying monster, feet braced, fingers flexed rigid, adrenaline shooting through her.

Silence. Stillness.

Smoke and reek from the plasma-burned corpses drifted across the moonlit desert plain. The wind had dropped to a whisper. The acrid smoke stung Siaran's eyes and mouth. When she turned away, blinking to clear the sting, the remaining warrior stepped out of the pall of smoke, directly in her path.

He was big. The top of her head did not reach his shoulder. At five foot ten, Siaran was not a short woman. This armor-clad predator stood easily over seven feet tall. His face was completely covered by the stylized metal mask; even the fierce-looking eye slits were screened by some kind of fine mesh.

Three precise red dots from a laser sight beside his right eye made a steady bullseye on her heart. Siaran stared into the impassive faceplate with just enough time to reconsider the wisdom of acting on something so fickle as uncertainty.


	4. Catharsis

**Chapter 4 – Catharsis**

For an eternal moment, neither of them moved. At last Siaran, conscious of her hurts and the psychological exhaustion from the fight, dragged her gaze from the barrel of the plasma gun to the warrior's impassive faceplate. "If you're going to do it, _do _it."

She didn't speak out of expectation that she'd be understood. The fight had left her edgy and upset. What she needed was to move, to ease cramped and trembling muscles. Even if it was to lay down and die. The expression molded into the warrior's mask was fierce; she imitated it and braced for the blast.

The plasma cannon lifted and retracted back over the hunter's left shoulder with a subtle whine. The laser sight flicked off and left the tall man-thing regarding her silently, half in shadow from the moonlight. The unchanging expression of his faceplate made her nervous, but she had so much curiosity, so many unanswered questions, that those balanced out the fear. Siaran watched him steadily back. Believing he wouldn't kill her outright, she straightened up, arching out the kinks in her spine. The gashes high up between her shoulder blades made her wince, but otherwise it felt good to stretch her muscles.

The hunter put his head to one side, for all the world like a curious dog, and studied her movements. The familiar gesture startled Siaran, and she was further disconcerted by the hope that speared through her. Could she communicate with this extraordinary being? She wasn't sure how friendly she wanted to get with him, but if she read his body language right, he was not displaying hostility now, but interest. Her eyes flicked over the rest of his massive body, seeing details she hadn't had time to notice before. His hair—probably not a headdress given the way it fell from underneath his helm—was tightly braided into smooth tapering strands, ornamented with small metal cylinders, and fell past his shoulders. Beneath the armor, he wore only a body suit made of a ropy mesh. The skin was dusky and yellowish, ticked and mottled with brown at the broad edges of the forearm and quadriceps muscles, and also on the sides, over the ribs. He wore a thick leather belt and a knee-length loincloth of the same bright, jointed metal as the rest of his armor. Small skulls and bones hung from the belt. Maybe ornaments, maybe trophies from previous hunts. His hands had four fingers and a thumb, same as hers, but each digit was tipped in a sharp black nail that was nearly a claw. The boots he wore had raised toe ridges that suggested clawed feet as well.

Siaran swallowed. He looked powerful, magnificent, and wholly intimidating. By contrast, she imagined she must look a pretty sorry excuse for a humanoid: no claws (even her fingernails were pared nearly to the quick, to prevent them cutting her palms during a closed-fist punch), square teeth, thin skin that bled now from neck and hip. God knew what kind of bacteria were crawling on those serpents' claws. She had no armor, either; just a filthy green fisherman's sweater, a torn pair of jeans, and hiking boots. Overall, she was sweaty, bloody, sore, and tired.

So it came as no surprise when the hunter turned away from his cursory examination of her before she was done looking him over. She couldn't have known she'd just been scanned via natural, infrared, and a form of heat-sensing x-ray vision, nor what her inscrutable new companion's opinion was. Warily, Siaran followed him; partly because she wasn't sure what else to do, but mostly because she didn't want to be caught alone if more of the serpents attacked.

Ignoring her completely, the silent warrior stalked over to the nearest serpent corpse. It was the one Siaran had impaled with the fallen warrior's spear, and it still hung there, grotesquely pierced through the brain pan. The hunter examined it thoroughly before he yanked the spear free. The carcass collapsed with a rattle of chitin, blood hissing on the sand. Turning abruptly away, he stood and looked down at the body of his fallen comrade. Siaran watched from a safe distance. The dead warrior's neck was a mess of torn flesh and iridescent green blood. There was no disguising the ragged hole that had torn part of his throat away. She closed her eyes, remembering how it had seemed such a small thing to take up the dead hunter's weapon and use it to protect herself. Now, in the aftermath, it seemed a desecration.

With a clink of armor, the hunter knelt over his fallen comrade. The sound made Siaran open her eyes. He was silent a moment, then raised his head and gave a long, wild roar of rage and grief that set Siaran's teeth on edge and made the fine hairs at the edge of her scalp prickle. She stumbled backed a few steps. The hunter's cry ebbed to a rattling moan, then died away. The silence that followed was profound, interrupted only by the whisper of night air that hissed in the sand and sounded now to her as if it carried an echo of despair.

She was given no time to appreciate the startling knowledge that this fierce creature could show despair at all. Moving quickly, he removed a couple of weapons from the body, including the shoulder-mounted plasma cannon, then rose and whirled on Siaran, menacing in the night with the moon silvering the edges of his armor. She held her ground though she was lightheaded with fear. The hunter looked down at her for a long moment, then over at the corpse of the black dragon. He raised the spear and tilted his head, watching her again, assessing her capabilities in light of the evidence that she had killed the serpent. Siaran let out a wordless exclamation, hardly a puff of air. It was all she could summon in a throat half-closed with tension.

"Yeah, well," she tried to keep the quaver out of her voice as she walked back up to the serpent carcass, kicking puffs of sand up from her boots. "That's not the only one. But...I'm sorry about your friend." The hunter turned away before she was done speaking, making her bite her lip at the apparent rebuff. For the briefest moment, Siaran considered taking offense. In the end, she decided he was not the sort of creature with whom it would be healthy to argue insult, and shrugged instead. He was scanning the area now, and moved off toward the wrecked car. He paused there to examine the half-buried serpent Siaran had killed during the height of the sandstorm. The look he gave her this time was longer and more penetrating, head down to see her better and again cocked slightly to one side.

She had followed him once more and now put one hand on the car's dented roof, seeking solidity and reassurance beneath that silent, inscrutable gaze. He shook his head slightly, sending the beaded braids clicking, and rose to his full height. With his left hand, he unfastened two slender tubes that connected his faceplate to a compact power pack on his back. The tubes detached with a pressurized hiss. Transfixed, Siaran watched as he lifted the helmet away.

The eyes, deep-set and green, held both human intelligence and the iron patience of a predatory animal. It was that combination, maybe even more than his alien strangeness, that made the face so shocking. Siaran sucked in a breath. From the high broad speckled forehead to the four overlapping, tusk-tipped mandibles that framed his mouth, his face was both frightening and hideously ugly. As she stared, he lowered his head and flared all four mandibles to reveal a deep red mouth lined with sharp teeth, and roared in her face.

The roar was loud, full of challenge, and those sharp mandibles were inches from her head. It was terrifying. But Siaran stood firm, noticing that his body language hadn't changed and praying she was right, that this was some sort of test. She'd been drilled _ad nauseum_ to pay more attention to a person's body language than to his voice or expression. Those things, by design, could be used to lie, but it was hard to lie with the whole body.

And the predator's body was flat-footed, knees straight, shoulders relaxed. She stood her ground, eyes wide but otherwise showing no fear.

The mandibles retracted with a click of surprise. She read the same emotion in his eyes. Beast-cold eyes with human light and a keen intelligence. She'd been right. Siaran sagged against the battered car and chuckled weakly. Life and warmth flowed through her limbs again. He was more than just a killing machine. And she was more than just a scared human fighting to stay alive.

With a grin that was somewhat jauntier than she felt, Siaran blinked up into the alien face. "Look, pal," she said. "My ancestors went naked into battle, armed only with tree branches. They screamed and yelled and charged down the Scottish hillsides, and scared the crap out of the Roman army, the best-trained fighting force in the world. So don't think you can scare me with your ugly face and some roaring, got it?"

It felt good to joke (even if her voice shook), to stretch and ease the tension in her mind just as she had done with her body. And because he probably couldn't understand word one, he could hardly take offense and rip her head off. In fact, he was regarding her again, head to one side. Suddenly, he drew a jewel-hafted knife from his belt and bent to the carcass of the dead serpent. Siaran let out a long, steadying breath. "Besides," she amended, just in case he might understand, and dislike, sarcasm. Her eyes were on the knife. "We fought together back there, like brothers." She might have even saved his life in that first rush, after his companion fell. That had to be worth something.

The predator squatted before her, over the sand-covered body. He used the knife to sever one of the serpent's long finger bones, then stood suddenly, so close she could have touched his chest without fully extending her arm. Siaran resisted the urge to recoil as he held the finger up for her inspection. "Careful with that thing, it burns," she muttered nervously, eyeing it.

Then he pointed to a mark, almost a brand, that scarred the skin of his forehead: a curving vertical slash little more than an inch long, and beside it, a second but reversed mark. It was reminiscent of a yin yang symbol because each mark mirrored and reversed the other: as if a yin yang had been drawn to the specifications of a Celtic or Viking rune.

The predator pointed at Siaran's forehead now, then at the severed claw. She understood. It was an ancient ritual practiced by nearly all Earth's own primitive hunting-based tribal cultures: he was going to mark her with the blood of her kill, branding her a member of the tribe. It made sense—the primitive-seeming weaponry, the beautiful and practiced motions of combat, the trophies that decorated his belt and hung from his neck. However advanced the plasma cannon and that big forehead suggested his race was, his customs were those of a much more primitive warrior society, complete with a code of honor and coming-of-age trials. And now he wanted to give her the mark of his clan, to honor her part in the battle.

That was a big step to acceptance.

"Full of surprises, aren't you?" Siaran knew it would hurt, and that it would be better if she didn't try to anticipate how much. Instead, she raised her head and pushed back the sweaty tendrils of hair that had escaped her braid. The hunter flared his lower mandibles and growled as he touched the severed digit to her pale forehead. Two strokes, clean and quick, he etched into her skin. It was a corrosive agony that gnawed into Siaran's skull, but she didn't move or make a sound. He scissored his mandibles, impressed. When he had received his own mark, the pain had made him snarl.

Siaran was biting her cheek, pain to combat pain. When he finished, the burning subsided to a fierce throbbing. They stared at each other a moment longer, trained combatants from very different worlds, united by circumstance and choice. Emboldened by the blooding ritual, and vulnerably aware of her lack of armor or weapons, Siaran opened her empty right hand and held it up to him.

He understood at once, and uttered a purring sort of growl she took for approval. Picking up his fallen companion's spear, which he'd dropped to dismember the corpse, he held it horizontally, just out of her reach, and peered at her closely to make sure she was paying attention. Siaran watched, a little confused but alert, as he rotated the spear haft and pressed the hidden catch that retracted the weapon to a third its full length, pulling the deadly blades inside the black handle. He handed the truncated spear to Siaran.

She hefted it, felt the weight, and found the catch. Smoothly, the spear sprang out to its full length. She smiled and retracted it. Nodded to the tall hunter.

Satisfied that he had properly armed this young warrior, the predator busied himself reattaching his faceplate. Using the nanodes built into the interface that sensed his eye and facial movements, he scanned back through the recordings he'd made of her voice, found the one he wanted, and blinked the sequence for a replay. "To-gether...like bro-thers." It wasn't perfect, but it was the first time he'd had the chance to attempt to code her voice. It was important that she understood, because they had some miles to travel this night before he could complete his mission, and the rescue ship would not reach orbit until the moon was past its zenith.

Siaran jumped as a tinny version of her own voice spoke to her from the hunter's faceplate. After watching him wide-eyed for a moment, she smiled a little. "That's a neat trick. Guess I'd better watch what I say around you, huh?"

In response, he gave a short, commanding bark and swept his arm out westward, fingers splayed. He moved a few steps in that direction and stopped, looking back at her, and barked again. It was a surprise, and a dubious honor, but it was clear that he wanted Siaran to go with him. Well, she thought, and why not? It was a damn sight better than being lost in the desert, and the predator had for some reason of his own accepted her as something of an equal. "Wait," she said, holding up both hands, palm out. "Let me get my things, okay?" She trotted around to the car's trunk and lifted out her Gregory pack. Checking the top zip pocket to make sure the full water bottle was there, she removed that and shrugged into the padded straps. The lumbar belt, once fastened, rode her hips below the gashes higher up on her waist, and it also lifted most of the weight off her shoulders. The discomfort was mild; she could walk like that for a few hours, she reckoned, before it became a problem.

Somewhere in the pack was a first aid kit, but she contented herself with being glad it was there for now. With the prospect of leaving came the urge to put as much distance between herself and the scene of the battle as possible. She took a long pull from the water bottle, then followed as the predator set off to the west with long, steady strides. He covered a surprising amount of ground, and Siaran had to adopt a loping walk to keep up. That was awkward at first, but it kept her warm in the cold, arid night, and for that she was glad. She carried her new spear in her right hand and kept her head up, looking around in the moonlight for signs of attack. She knew just enough about outdoor tracking to not look directly at any object but rather past it, trusting her brain to work out the shape of a thing and whether or not it moved.

But the cold desert was still and unchanging. The sandstorm must have passed this way, but there was so little on that vast barren plain that a storm could damage that its path was undetectable. Nothing crawled or screamed or swooped down upon them. The tall predator at her side paced tirelessly, alert but relaxed. After a while, his sense of security lulled Siaran too, and her mind turned to other things.

She finally broke the silence between them. "I'm not sure how much you understand me, but it'd make me feel a lot better if I had a name to call you. Something I can pronounce." No doubt the clicks and growls and guttural barks were his own language, but it made no sense at all to her except as a general indication of intent, based on tone and pitch.

The hunter strode on, showing no sign of listening to her. Undaunted, Siaran pressed on, watching him from the corners of her eyes. "My name is Siaran." She spread her left hand over her chest. "See-ahr-ahn." She made a fist, tapped her chest. "Understand?"

He continued to ignore her. He didn't even look at her. "Fine," she told him flatly. "You won't help me, I'll make up a name by myself." Frowning, she studied him, then winced as the muscles creasing on her forehead set the mark he'd given her to throbbing all over again. Something clicked, and her face cleared. Siaran smiled. "I'm going to call you Rune, so that no matter what happens, I'll remember how I got this scar." With two fingers, she pointed toward her forehead, then up at his. "Rune. Okay?"

No response.

"You really know how to chat up the ladies, don't you, Rune? Must be those boyish good looks."

Refreshing as it was to know she'd regained sufficient confidence to bait him, it was a game she quickly wearied of. It just wasn't much fun when the adversary couldn't retort. Siaran gave up and saved her breath for walking. There was enough of that for both of them.

The moon rose higher above the plain, shedding brilliant cold light on the emptiness. The wind picked up to a dismal howl, occasionally stinging Siaran's cheeks with sand. Here and there, a lonely outcropping of rock threw a shadow. These made Siaran tense at first. But the rocks were just rocks, the shadows empty of threat. Still they moved steadily west.

Around midnight, Rune found the camp.

* * *

_Author's Note: Happy Thanksgiving! I am thankful for everyone who has read, reviewed, and bookmarked this tale so far. The inspiration is still going strong, and I managed to complete another chapter in between baking pies, going for a pre-feast run, and gorging myself to the point of pain. Hooray for fat-of-the-land holidays._


	5. Nomad's Land

**Chapter 5 – Nomad's Land**

It was a nomad camp, sitting by itself on the bare rock of the desert. Whoever had erected it must not fear attack; no attempts had been made to shelter the three round tents, called _ger_, from the elements or from discovery. Two of the _ger _were dark, but diffuse light shone through the heavy patterned cloth that covered the frame of the third. There was also, heavy on the night air, the unmistakable odor of a dung fire.

Siaran stopped. Her legs were heavy, and she drew the cold air into her lungs in long, steadying draughts. Anger at this weakness flared through her. For the past three years, she had finished the Seattle Marathon in four hours or better. It was something she was distinctly proud of, and she was sure that the endurance granted by training for the grueling distance had boosted her ability to outlast a tough opponent on the mat. And yet here she was, lead-footed and buzzing from fatigue. She had never been so glad to stop.

Then again, she reasoned, she'd never endured a four-hour forced march with an alien warrior and a full pack across the desert after fighting for her life against monsters that had probably spawned every dragon legend there was. Probably she could chalk at least part of her current state up to psychological exhaustion. Everyone had a limit, and while Siaran prided herself on being mentally and physically tough, she was close to hers.

Now, she leaned on her extended spear and blinked as if hypnotized by the play of firelight on the nomad tent. It would be good to sleep, but that seemed a faint hope. Beside her, Rune growled disapproval at this sudden lack of motion. Without waiting to see if Siaran would follow, the predator strode toward the tent, clicking in agitation to himself.

Siaran glared at his back, full of resentment for his apparent tirelessness. "Go pound sand," she muttered as she dragged herself forward again. "You'd better not expect me to help if you plan on slaughtering these poor people."

As soon as she'd spoken, she paused again. This time, fear swept over her tiredness, leaving her wide awake and full of dismay. What if that was exactly what Rune planned to do? She knew she couldn't stop him. Torn between wanting to trust the strange being who had put his trust in her, and knowing what his strength and weapons were capable of, Siaran wavered, standing motionless in the shadows, unsure whether to follow or call out a warning.

Rune had circled the _ger _to the south and now stood facing the tent, his profile to Siaran. He leaned forward and she saw his braids swing, the metal rings catching the light and throwing it back like sparks. Loud in the silence, he uttered a coughing roar. Siaran flinched. At once, the thick tent flaps were thrown back. Light streamed across the desert floor in a long, bright finger, illuminating the intimidating form of the predator standing there.

A man stepped out of the _ger_ and held empty hands up to Rune as if in supplication. Siaran, invisible in the darkness, gaped at his lack of fear. Then the man bent down beneath the warrior's metal gaze and prostrated himself at Rune's feet. The warrior looked back toward Siaran as if he could see her perfectly—he probably could, too, damn him; that faceplate no doubt had infrared vision—made his impatient clicking sound, and stepped past the motionless human into the _ger_. After a moment, the man got up and followed, letting the tent flap fall closed behind him.

Almost as shocked by this display of familiarity as she would have been by a massacre, Siaran took a few steadying breaths before she felt able to follow. "What," she whispered, "the _hell_ is going on here?"

Then she followed. She pushed aside the fabric of the makeshift doorway just enough to see what was going on inside. The man who had met Rune outside now brought forward a wide stool, sturdy, padded, its cover worked in geometric patterns of red and gold. Six other people—four men and two women—knelt before the stool, eyes lowered. Their heads were bare, but the cloaklike woolen garments they wore were richly dyed and worked with fine threads. While she knew little of the nomad culture, Siaran still hazarded a guess that these seven people were tribal chiefs and elders. The Gobi nomads held closely with the old ways. The modern world encroached on them about as much as it did on the changeless, inhospitable desert.

The ritualistic feel to their posture, the way the man carried the stool and set it down so carefully, didn't surprise her. What surprised her was that these people clearly knew Rune, or at least his kind. In their windburned faces was a reverential fear like religious awe.

Yeah. That surprised the hell out of her.

Now the reason for the broad, low stool became clear. Rune had been standing in a half-crouch to keep his head from punching through the low canvas roof of the _ger_. As soon as the bench was set down, the hunter sat on the edge of the padded seat. Even sitting, there was a look of harnessed power about him, as if he were not made for repose. The first man backed away to join the others on the floor, hands folded into his lap and head bowed.

Rune's sharp-nailed fingers went to his belt. His back was to Siaran, so she couldn't see what he was doing until he held aloft a serpent claw. Maybe the same one he'd used to mark her forehead; it looked fresh, not desiccated like his other grisly trophies. With a soft hiss, Rune let the claw fall to the floor at the elders' feet. They made an odd-sounding collective sigh, somewhere between fear and relief. The first elder picked the claw up gingerly, then the elders all rose together and gathered around him, each one touching the severed digit in turn: a single quick press with the index finger. The last person, one of the women, held out a red cloth shot with golden threads. The man placed the bony black thing into it, and she folded the edges three times and carried it over to the mud-and-wattle hearth that sat, broad and squat, in the center of the _ger_. Chanting softly, the woman tossed the cloth onto the dung fire. The smoke took on an acrid odor, making Siaran's nose twitch; she had smelled it before, when the hunters' plasma guns had burned the serpents out on the plain.

As the woman turned away from the fire, she saw Siaran standing half in the doorway and went very still. She spoke a single sharp word in her own tongue and then everyone turned to look. Everyone except Rune, who just made his clicking trill and adjusted his position on the stool.

The nomads stared at the tall, pale Western woman whose forehead bore the raw imprint of the same symbol etched into the Destroyer's helmet. For Destroyer they had named his people: destroyer of the terrible black dragons that ate up their goats and their villages deep in the desert, and destroyer of tribes as well, should the people decide to take up arms against the masked warriors. At those times, their wrath had been terrible. The nomads of the inner Gobi, and those along the isolated wall of the T'ien Shan range to the west, had long ago learned the wisdom of showing only passivity and inner strength to the Destroyers. The legend went back many generations. In return, the people were not harmed, and whenever a dragon nest threatened a family or group, the Destroyers would come and hunt the beasts down. When they had finished, they would bring proof of their deed to the nearest camp and depart as mysteriously as they had arrived. The people didn't fear Destroyers who showed up with such a trophy. The rare times they showed up before a battle to claim a few of the young, strong members of the tribe as sacrifices for one of their great hunts—those were what the nomads feared. But no one now lived who remembered a time when that had happened.

Sometimes the Destroyers came alone; sometimes in groups of two or three. But no one remembered a time when they had brought a human marked as one of their own. The elders were astonished, and tried not to show it. They did not know what to make of this pale-skinned, round-eyed Western girl. Her face was drawn and wary, but unafraid, and she looked straight at the Destroyer, which no nomad would ever do lest he seem to challenge one.

The Destroyer made its clicking-growl sound and moved off the stool to kneel on one of the many horsehair rugs that made the floor of the _ger_. Averting their eyes from him, the elders held a quick conversation. Who were they to question the will of a Destroyer? And besides, it was custom to offer succor to any lost traveler who did not have violent intentions. The Western girl looked bone-tired, she was bleeding, and it would be most unwise to anger the companion of a Destroyer. Perhaps this was not for them to know; it was simply for them to do.

The next thing Siaran knew, she was being ushered into the warmth and light of the _ger_. The relief at being out of the wind and cold was palpable; she stumbled and then blinked around at the internal wooden frame of the massive structure. It was designed to be broken down and packed onto yaks or camels in a matter of minutes, but it looked deceptively permanent. She guessed the floor rugs were there as much for insulation as for beauty. A few hangings separated what must be sleeping or even bathing facilities from the main part of the _ger_, near the doorway. Above the hearth was only empty sky, to let out most of the smoke and smell of the dung fire. The place smelled strongly of goat, but it was warm and she was surrounded by curious human faces. After the night she'd had, Siaran desperately needed that familiarity, and she found herself reaching out to grasp the nomads' strong, wizened brown hands, and smiling.

Those same hands helped her out of her pack, moved her out of the draft and past Rune on his rug, eased her onto a floor cushion. She hissed when her sweater pulled away from her injured neck, opening the partial scabs and letting the blood ooze out again. The pain, which had dulled to a throbbing ache during the hike, set up a fresh clamor. Someone brought a bowl of steaming water from the hearth, and a woolen cloth, laying them before her with a bow. "Thank you," Siaran said, and meant it; the water looked clean, and she knew she was overdue in tending her injuries.

The elders retreated to the hearth, eyes averted from her and Rune. Siaran suspected that, were she alone, they'd behave much differently; they seemed out of their depth, not sure how much they should help her. Eyeing Rune, who was now busy inspecting his armor and weapons, extracting and retracting blades, scraping off dried blood, and generally making sure everything was in working order, Siaran figured it was for the best. The nomads' behavior toward Rune made her think they had almost been expecting him. No doubt he also planned to leave her with them, which she ought to be grateful for. He could have left her to find her own way in the desert, or even killed her.

She didn't feel grateful. She felt cheated. And that was ridiculous. She had been a part of something she could never have imagined was real, and now that it was about to end, she was upset because she somehow expected more? Siaran shook her head once, angrily. She wasn't a kid anymore. Sometimes things just happened that couldn't be controlled and made no sense, like the brutal murder of her parents. You didn't always get a reason, much less a happy ending. You just went on as best you could.

The best she could do right now was take care of her injuries. Pushing Rune and all her unanswered questions out of her mind, Siaran dipped the cloth into the bowl of water, wrung it out, and raised it to the back of her neck. She stopped halfway, catching the strong whiff of goat. She sniffed the cloth, unsure whether it had been made from goat hair or recently used to bathe a goat, and decided that it was questionably sanitary at best. Quickly, hoping not to offend the watching nomads, she used the strong-smelling rag to clean her hands and face. With a wan smile, she looked up at them and said, "No offense, but I think I'll stick to neosporin and sterile gauze."

They understood her no more than Rune appeared to, and only bobbed their heads graciously. A couple of them smiled. Laying aside the cloth, Siaran dug through her pack and found her first aid kit. Hands on the hem of her sweater, she hesitated. It might be considered offensive in this culture to show too much skin. She scooted back toward the outer wall of the tent and turned away from the curious faces, rolling up the stiff sweater just far enough to expose the four gashes that ran diagonally from her floating ribs to the jut of her hipbone. The area was tender, and after Siaran had used several alcohol prep pads to clean the slashed skin, her fingers were shaking so hard that she had to take a break before she could finish.

She closed her eyes and breathed from her belly, trying not to gasp, still holding the stiff, blood-soaked hem of the sweater away from her flesh. Tried to tell herself that the sting in her eyes was from alcohol fumes and not pain. It couldn't be pain. She hadn't cried when Rune burned her face with blood made of acid, had she?

When she opened her eyes again, things were happening. One of the men had noticed Siaran's difficulty and was coming toward her to help. Rune moved so quickly nobody even saw him get up. He was just there suddenly, thrusting out a massive arm to stop the nomad from reaching Siaran. He blocked out the light from lamp and hearth as he crouched above her, dark and strange in his bright armor, long braids swinging, rumbling a warning behind the menacing faceplate as he looked from the terrified nomads to the girl on the floor.

The people huddled together, alarmed at this sudden turn of events. Siaran felt her body go as taut as a whip, waiting for the killing to start. But Rune stayed where he was, his big body interposed between her and the others, still rumbling. She reached slowly for her first aid kid, eyes locked on the predator. He didn't move. Hastily, she opened the kit and took out a tube of antibiotic gel, a roll of gauze bandage, and a metal cylinder of adhesive tape. Her fingers felt thick and clumsy under Rune's scrutiny, and she was too nervous to be gentle as she dressed and taped the three long gashes. It would be worse trying to do her shoulders with him looming over her like that. It was like being watched by a hungry tiger.

Keeping her eyes on the floor, Siaran scrubbed the rag quickly over her fingers and picked up another alcohol pad. She could hear the nomads whispering together, beyond the bulk of Rune's body. They sounded afraid. So was she. When she raised one hand to pull her hair back, the predator's rumble turned to a throaty snarl and he stooped to grab her one-handed by the back of the neck. "_No_," she gasped, and tried to twist away, but Rune's grip only tightened, forcing her chin down onto her chest.


	6. Sundering

**Chapter 6 – Sundering**

Afraid and angry in equal measure, Siaran nevertheless had the sense to hold still. Rune's submission hold allowed for no head movement to either side, and if she tried to move her arms or legs, he could break her neck with a twitch of his wrist. She waited, inert and helpless, trying to gauge by the sounds he made what his next action might be. It was no good. The only way she had of understanding the big hunter lay in evaluating his body language. Because she couldn't see him at all, that option was out. "God _damn_ you," she ground out between clenched teeth, furious that he had bested her so easily. Her neck muscles were starting to cramp, and it was hard to swallow or breathe.

Rune plucked the white square neatly away from her nerveless fingers. A moment later, to her astonishment, she felt him press the cold square of the alcohol pad against the gouges at the base of her neck. The endorphin rush from the pain sent her heart thumping painfully; she could almost taste the iron in her blood as it pounded alongside her windpipe, underneath Rune's fingers. He growled. With the deep punctures swabbed, he imitated Siaran's use of the antibiotic goo, bandage, and tape. The wounds were deeper than the shallow grooves in her side; Siaran stared unseeingly at the woven rug beneath her knees while spots of color bloomed in her vision. She focused on the pain, wrapped her mind around it, held it hotly to herself like a lover. She was afraid she would pass out if she didn't.

It also helped ease the shock of accepting that Rune was not trying to kill her, but to help her.

When he finished, the hunter withdrew with a satisfied rattle of mandibles behind his faceplate. Eyes averted, Siaran raised a shaky hand and felt the strips of gauze taped across her spine and the top of her trapezoid muscles. It was as neat a field dressing as a trained medic could perform; a lot better than what she could have done. He hadn't been gentle, but after the initial fright he hadn't tried to hurt her, either.

She was spared having to dig any deeper into Rune's motivations when one of the elders sidled toward her, keeping as far away from the predator as possible, and handed her a steaming cup. Siaran accepted it with both hands and raised it to her mouth. Tea; strong, bitter, and smoky. She drank it as fast as she could, scalding her tongue. The liquid seared a welcome heat all the way down to her belly. She could feel Rune watching her, but she refused to look at him.

Draining the cup, Siaran rose to return it to the man who'd brought it. Rune was by her side at once, smooth dreadlocks swinging. She resisted the urge to cringe back against the wall of the hearth, as the nomads had. The hunter tilted his head, then gave a short bark of command. Siaran shook her head, and he repeated the bark. "I don't know what you want, Rune," she snapped, more bravely than she felt. The respect the tribespeople had shown her must be acting contrary to her common sense; she was putting on a front, not wanting to back down with them watching. After a series of chitters, the hunter strode to the _ger_ entrance and flung back the flap. He looked out into the night, then back at Siaran.

The weight of understanding dropped on her like a rock into her belly. Rune was leaving. Siaran rounded on the Mongolians, who made small obeisances. She realized she had no idea how, and no desire, to communicate to them her need to find transport north, to Ulan Bator. Looking at the passive wisdom in their brown faces, she felt more alienated and lost than she had in all the time she'd spent in Rune's company.

Her whole life—all her hard work, accomplishments, and as-yet unattained goals—had changed that night. Siaran felt like a different person, looking at a different world with hopes she'd never entertained. She didn't know how to take it back. She didn't _want_ to.

"I need to tell him goodbye," she whispered to the seven tribal elders, and pushing the cup into their hands, she grabbed her pack and ran after Rune.

He was standing beyond the pool of orange light that faintly lit the desert floor around the tent, a menacing black silhouette in the night. Siaran went to him, despite the apprehension that shook her. Rune ignored her, concentrating instead on the holographic display he'd raised on his wrist gauntlet. On closer inspection, the gauntlet proved to be a sophisticated computer, with digital readouts in red on a flat panel to one side of the hologram. Siaran saw a starfield, and the sleek outline of something moving across it, before Rune turned it off. Then he turned his head toward her and simply waited, crossing his hands over his belt.

Now that she had his attention, Siaran found that she didn't know what to say. Thanks, tears, a handshake, a hug—all the human ways to express regret at parting seemed inappropriate and weak. Whining about things she couldn't have would only cause her self-loathing, and besides, she wasn't sure what she wanted anyway. The chance to see more, she supposed. To understand who Rune was, where he came from, why he hunted the black serpents, and why he had not only spared Siaran but marked her with the same scar he bore. Her educated guesses were not answers. She wanted answers. She wanted the chance to ask more questions.

She stood there gazing into Rune's impassive faceplate, and when she finally opened her mouth to speak, she was interrupted by thunder, off to the northwest.

The sky was clear, with the full moon sinking to the western horizon. The thunder grew louder, until Siaran could feel the vibrations in the air. There was nothing in the northwest except an outcropping of rock, half a dozen boulders honed by the wind, leaning against each other like drunken giants in the night. Rune strode past her, toward the sound of the thunder, and Siaran followed after one backward glance at the silent _ger_.

He didn't try to stop her, and she followed him all the way to the rocks. The thunder was louder now, sharper, like a massive turbine whine, and hot air washed over them both. Then the noise cut out; Siaran could hear it ebb away, slower and deeper until it stopped. Standing just behind Rune's left shoulder, she had no time to wonder what had made the noise before a brilliant wedge of light appeared, fifteen or more feet up in the air. Siaran could make no sense of what she was seeing until the wedge widened and grew, became a rectangle, became a metal ramp lowering itself out of the sky until it touched the desert floor, and she was looking up at pistons and hydraulics and a square hatchway whose interior flickered with red lights.

The ship uncloaked itself then, and sat long and sinister on the plain, its massive bow raised and hooded like a striking cobra. Red lights flared symmetrically along the sleek hull. Its design was so obviously not of human creation that Siaran knew, with the brutal force of reality, the truth about Rune that she had only guessed and allowed her mind to slide around. The weight of it was on her now, and she could only stand and stare.

Four armored, dreadlocked beings came down the ramp and stopped before them. Rune clicked and chattered for a moment, then fell silent. All five hunters' heads turned toward the human. She regarded them back as calmly as she could, chin high, gaze level. Overwhelmed past the ability to act, Siaran merely waited to see what would happen next.

It was anticlimactic. After a long moment, the five tall warriors turned away and began to ascend the ramp. Still Siaran stood immobile, though now her brain screamed at her to do something, say something, _anything_.

At the top of the ramp, Rune stopped and turned back to look at her. Siaran watched him, holding the spear he'd given her in a death grip. She took a hesitant step forward, then another. Rune gave his command-bark again, but otherwise made no move. Siaran waited the space of another heartbeat, but the invitation was plain enough. "Why not?" she whispered, and followed the five hunters into the belly of their ship. She would not be at the Worlds next week. She didn't know where she would be. And for the first time in her regimented life, she felt excitement and wonder at not knowing, instead of fear.

She was, by rights, walking where a famous astronaut or physicist, or maybe a world leader, should walk. As she followed the hunters along the red-lit black corridors, Siaran once again felt a quiver of unreality, as if she was half in a dream. Her mind was shielding itself from most sensory input until it could sort through and make sense of what was happening, in context with what it already knew, or thought it knew. There had been quite a few revelations this night, not least of which was the fact that she now appeared to be a guest on the goddamn _spaceship_ of a race of intelligent, ultraviolent beings.

The black walls were made from dense, polished metal, subtly lit by banks of red lights set at intervals along the way. The ceiling was lost in darkness above, but Siaran thought she could see the symmetry of pipes and hoses up there in the darkness. The floor was black also, a grid with a curious triangular pattern. It was rubbery beneath her soles, not grated, and it deadened her footfalls and those of the hunters, so that she could make out a throb of power pitched so low that it was almost more felt than heard.

Corridors branched alternately left and right, but her escort kept to the broad main causeway. Siaran followed about four paces behind. Abruptly, the causeway opened into a large room. It had the same glossy black interior of the corridors. A huge window bay—a viewscreen—filled the entire wall opposite the doorway. External lights lit the stony waste of the Gobi in a wide panorama. She could see the standing rocks below and off to one side. They must be in the forward part of the ship, the bow.

The two walls that flanked the windows were filled by banks of computers. Six more hunters manned them, three to a side. They turned toward the new arrivals, greeting them with clicks and growls, then peered at Siaran out of lambent yellow or green eyes. She fought the urge to shrink back; their faces were still frightening, something out of a scary story from childhood. The knowledge that they could tear her to bits with little effort was no comfort. She concentrated on keeping her steps measured and firm, though she did slow down as she entered the vast control room, looking around, curious despite her fear. Holographic displays hovered above each computer bank. One showed Earth; the other, a larger version of the three-dimensional star map she'd seen on Rune's wrist computer.

She went to stand quietly beside Rune, who was at least some level of familiar. He unhooked and removed his faceplate and looked down at her, considering. Bulbous forehead, fierce eyes, crablike tusked mandibles, thick long strands of hair growing from bony knobs far back on the skull. Siaran was ready this time and had no reaction to hide. Instead, she wondered with a hint of wry humor whether her own face was that frighteningly ugly to him. Anyway, she preferred it to the faceplate; at least she could read some reaction in his eyes this way.

The alert attention in the room was all on her; Siaran could almost feel its weight. Rune extended a hand and grazed the symbol he'd marked on her forehead. The touch was gentle. Strange, to think that a creature made so perfectly for combat could make a gesture that felt like a caress. The thought made her uncomfortable, and then Siaran remembered the bandage on the back of her neck and felt her face grow hot under Rune's fingers. It would be a lot healthier for her if she quit jumping to conclusions about intent, at least until she'd had more time to observe and interact with Rune's people.

So resolved, she stood silent, enduring the warrior's touch, her eyes on his face. His hand lingered for one strange moment, then fell away as he barked a string of clipped syllables to the rest of the hunters. Siaran saw now that they all bore the same mark on their heads that Rune, and now she, did. They all looked expectantly at her when Rune finished, moving a few steps closer, tilting their heads in curiosity. Siaran bared her little human teeth at them in a scared grin.

"Hi," she said, but her voice squeaked, pulverizing her attempt at careless nonchalance. She swallowed. "I'm Siaran," she continued lamely. _Please don't eat me_, she just barely kept herself from adding. It was a lot harder to hold to her new plan of observation before action when they were looming over her like that.

Nothing happened for a moment. Then there was an explosion of sinister clicks as eleven pairs of mandibles pulled back, exposing eleven sharp-fanged red mouths. Facial muscles that had nothing to do with smiling gave a ghastly parody of Siaran's grin. A few of them chittered incomprehensibly, but Rune beside her was relaxed, and nobody made any threatening moves. Bolstered by this, or maybe just by being still alive, Siaran saluted the group of hunters the way martial artists had saluted for centuries: right fist closed and snapped across the breastbone to hover directly above the heart. She felt faintly ridiculous, but reasoned that action was better than speaking and hoped they would understand her gesture of respect.

To her surprise, they responded at once with a similar motion, right hand raised and thumping the opposite shoulder. Some of them roared. It seemed she'd hit upon something positive; a greeting, or maybe a display of triumph. Siaran relaxed a fraction, and for the first time felt the hint of a real smile twitch the corners of her mouth.

She wasn't given long to enjoy her success. The introductions over, the six predators at the controls now returned their attention to the instruments. The low hum of the ship's drive rose in pitch and power. A few seconds later, the landing gear retracted with a faint _thunk _and the ship was airborne, rotating slowly on the horizontal as it ascended, gaining speed. Siaran saw the last sweep of the powerful landing lights flash across a distant mountain range before they were extinguished. A sort of pressurized hum went through the ship as its cloaking device engaged. There was a long moment of blackness, during which Siaran could see only dimly the shapes of the hunters and feel the cool bulk of Rune's body close to hers. She moved slightly away at the moment the ship's acceleration increased sharply to escape velocity, and nearly fell from the sudden increase in weight. The floor tugged at her feet and there was a tightness in her chest that grew quickly uncomfortable.

Siaran bent her knees to relieve some of the pressure, and widened her stance as the hunters were doing. She glanced up at Rune, who did not look back but simply pointed at the viewscreen. Looking, Siaran saw that it was no longer dark. It was full of stars.

Not the stars of the night sky as seen from Earth, obscured and flattened by the interference of atmosphere in even the remotest location. What she saw was _space_, the vast cold lonely distances of it, where the remote suns shone like beacons to guide those brave enough to sail the gulfs between them. In those dark gulfs were wonders and perils: the impossibly huge banks of cloudy nebulae, where new stars spawned phoenixlike from the dust and ashes of dead ones; dense neutron stars with their strong cosmic signals and invisible gravity wells; and a whole array of galactic bodies beyond Siaran's ken. And she was going out among them.

The terrible pressure eased, and still Siaran stood and watched the stars. Calculations were made, a course set, and the ship set to auto-navigation as one by one the predators left the bridge. It was Rune's clicking trill, part query and part command, that finally penetrated Siaran's wonder and awe. Reluctantly, she followed him out of the control room and along another set of causeways until he stopped at an unmarked door recessed into the black wall. All along this stretch of corridor were similar doors; this one was the fourth on the left from the last intersection.

Rune pointed at an indented metal plate set at an angle beside the door, opened his hand, and mimed pressing it against the plate. Understanding, Siaran set her left hand to the metal. A subtle whir and click, and the door retracted, revealing a plain square room, unadorned and sporting the same ubiquitous black motif, about twelve feet by twelve. Not spacious by hunter standards, probably a standard-issue private bunk, but a good-sized room for a human. Most of the floor was taken up by the high broad bed, which sat on a solid square of metal bolted to the floor. Along the opposite wall was an arched entry to some inner chamber. Siaran devoutly hoped it contained identifiable plumbing facilities.

Stepping past Rune, she paused to smile her thanks. It would be so good to get clean, and sleep. She could deal with the mountain of uncertainties that clawed at her tired mind—her destination, her companions, the language barrier, their expectations of her—much better after rest and a hot shower, or whatever passed for a hot shower here. Rune clicked and rattled at her and Siaran turned back to him as she slipped the pack with finality off her shoulders. "I wish I could understand what you're saying."

In answer, he reached out and touched her forehead again, tracing the brand with cool fingers that did not have the roughness she'd expected from such reptilian-looking skin. Rune touched his own mark, then lifted his massive right fist across his chest in the salute-gesture she'd used in the control room, and backed out of the door. He still looked terrifying, silhouetted in the dim light, but Siaran felt less afraid now that some level of familiarity had been established.

"Night," she whispered as the door whooshed closed, and she was finally alone. She stood a moment in the diffuse red light, feeling her pulse beat strongly in her throat, listening to the throb of the ship's engines. Solitude in the midst of an alien environment was a strange experience; something that mixed calm with a heightened alertness. Not unsettling, exactly, but not the total relaxation of a familiar retreat.

With a long, low exhalation, Siaran moved to the high bed and dumped her pack there. Then she went through the inner door, which was indeed a bathroom of sorts. After a brief struggle, she worked out the rudiments of the plumbing and was soon filling the tall tank that dominated the bathroom with a slightly viscous, lemon-colored fluid that smelled pleasantly astringent. The stuff oozed out of the taps at blood temperature and seemed disinclined to lose its heat. Siaran stripped to the skin, peeling off the stiff sweater and her torn jeans with care lest she dislodge the bandages. She'd probably have to reapply them after her bath, but that was no reason to rip them off in her haste to be out of her stinking clothes. There were no mirrors, but she didn't doubt she was a sorry sight.

At last the tank was full and she submerged to her chin, letting her tired body go limp as the fluid eased away the hurts of the battle and the long trek through the desert. More buoyant than water, the strange liquid had some kind of healing property, maybe anti-inflammatory. By the time she roused, afraid she'd fall asleep in the tank, her muscles felt refreshed and supple. Siaran climbed out with the fluid sheeting from her body, and after a couple of wrong guesses, she found a button on the wall that activated jets of hot air. She was deliciously tired and relaxed, just standing there letting the blasts dry her.

Then she returned to the main room and dressed quickly in a ribbed gray tank and a pair of the loose-fitting black canvas pants that were part of her Tae Kwon Do uniform. She kept an eye on the door as she did so, uncertain whether there was a lock, but she remained undisturbed. Pushing the pack to the floor, she climbed onto the bed and slid under the simple cover, which seemed to be made of small animal skins sewn cleverly together to form a pattern. The room dimmed by slow degrees until it was dark. All Siaran could hear was the throb of the ship's engines as they powered toward their destination. The rhythm eased her, as if with each parsec she traveled further from everything she'd known, the more distant and meaningless her worries became. Her last thought as she slid heavily into sleep had the nonsensical clarity of a dream: Rune's people must not do a lot of reading in bed if the lights were programmed to go down as soon as one's head hit the pillow.


	7. Form and Motion

_Author's Note: Before this chapter goes up, I want to thank the anonymous fan who posted the review at the end of Chapter 6, questioning my treatment of Rune's combat partner from the fight in the desert. I wasn't sure what to do with the dead Predator, because you're right; he was merely a plot device to allow Siaran to commit herself to the fight. However, just killing him and leaving him unmourned is unfair. Since your review, I rented and watched Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, seeking more insight into Predator motivations, then went back and altered the chapter so that Rune gives a tribute to his fallen companion similar to what the Wolf did for the dead Predators in the crashed ship. I considered imitating that movie even further by giving Rune a vial of blue liquid to erase all traces of the fight, but decided that would be too convenient. So, thank you! That is the sort of review I need: one that finds the holes and calls them into question. I think the chapter is better for it, and hope you agree._

_For everyone who has read and reviewed so far, you honor me. It's tremendously gratifying to read such positive reviews, and so many of them. I appreciate you sticking with this perhaps slow-to-get-going story, and your call for updates helps keep me focused on what's turning into a much longer tale than I anticipated._

_One more thing: mirari1, I'm so pleased I can keep you guessing. :) Call it payback for your remarkable Warcraft fic, which continues to impress and inspire me._

* * *

**Chapter 7 – Form and Motion**

Siaran was awakened by two things at once: hunger and the sound of her door sliding open. There was no lock, after all. Terrific. She squinted at the rectangle of light that spilled briefly across the bed before a humanoid form put a shadow over her again. She sat up. "I'm awake, okay? What do you want?" Her voice was sharp; she didn't relish the idea of one of the hunters walking into her room when she was still disoriented by sleep.

At the sound of her voice, the lights flicked on. They shone on the dark hair that covered Siaran's shoulders like a cloak, the long black locks of her visitor, and the fine-stitched brown leather he wore. Instead of mesh and armor, a sort of bolero jacket with reinforced shoulders and forearms, and pants that reminded her of football tights, similarly reinforced in the thigh, with a decorative loincloth that reached the knee joint. The leather fit close and looked supple, and was stitched and edged with some strong-looking material that might have been treated gut, like violin strings. Whatever it was, it was cleverly done to embellish the garments. There were artisans among the hunters who knew how to tailor to great effect; the clothing put Rune's ugly face at odds with his sculpted physique. His musculature was disturbingly human.

He came no closer than the doorway, so Siaran rubbed her face and yawned. "You really should knock before you walk in on a girl like that, Rune." The predator rumbled at her, sounding impatient. Her neck and side felt stiff as she pushed back the fur and swung out of bed, but not too painful. Giving silent thanks that she'd always been a fast healer, Siaran padded across the floor and stood in front of Rune, consciously trying to reach her full height. She still didn't quite come to his shoulder. Pretending she felt less vulnerable than she did, she swept her hands up and down to indicate his wardrobe. "What's the occasion? Dinner?" There was no need to reinforce the hope into her tone; she was famished.

She also reckoned that it was a good idea to keep talking to the hunters. It might help them pick up the rudiments of her meaning through tone, at least, the same way she was learning to distinguish between their various growls, barks, and purring rattles. The vocal playback she'd heard might something built into their faceplates merely as a hunting lure, or it might mean they understood more of her language than they let on. Either way, talking couldn't hurt, and the sound of her own voice could keep her from going crazy; something familiar in strange surroundings.

Rune tilted his head, upper mandibles flaring as he listened. He pointed to his mouth, then to his midsection, then his mouth again.

"Oh, _fantastic_." Siaran patted her own stomach, which rumbled on cue. She grinned, and Rune growled. "That's just what I wanted to hear. Lead the way." She made a sweeping gesture toward the doorway and moved to step around the hunter, thinking only of food.

Rune's next growl was louder, and he moved to block her path. Siaran scowled at him. "What now? Come on, Rune, please. I'm hungry." She pointed to her belly again, then her mouth as he had done. But he flared all four mandibles in displeasure and reached out to pluck at the shoulder of her tank top. For the first time, Siaran saw that the skin on the back of his hands was black, and pale on the palms: camouflage for a hunting predator. Rune clicked his mandibles together rapidly; the sound, unmuffled by his faceplate, reminded her of something between a lion's purr and a rattlesnake's tail. It was clear that he was trying to communicate, and irritated because she wasn't grasping the concept at once. Siaran nodded. "Okay," she said slowly. "I'm paying attention."

The rattle smoothed, and Rune now pointed at himself, using the same motions Siaran had earlier to indicate his clothing. He swept his hand dismissively at her own clothes and flared his mandibles again. Then he cocked his head sharply, which set the long braids swinging. The metal bands clacked together as Siaran finally understood, and groaned.

"You've got to be kidding me. A formal dinner? Is that a _tuxedo_?" The concept was absurd. What she knew so far of Rune's culture was that, while technologically advanced, it relied heavily on ritual and honorable conduct in battle. And yet here was Rune, dressed in fine leather, clearly displeased with her attire. How would he know what was formal wear for a human, anyway? She was half tempted to put on her _do bohk_ uniform and leave it at that. Then again, if the hunters could make clothing as fine as what Rune was wearing, they'd know imposture at once.

After a long moment in which obstinance nearly won out, Siaran gave in with the bad grace of someone who knows the consequence of refusal will be painful. "Fine," she grumped. "But you're not staying in here while I change. Out." Firmly, she pointed to the door. Rune gave the low purr she just knew was laughter and lowered his head, but Siaran knew mockery when she saw it and was not impressed with his apparent submission to her will. She waited until the door had closed behind him, and then she changed in the bathroom anyway. As fast as she could. Choosing her clothes was a non-issue, because she'd only brought one formal garment. When she'd found the dress, Siaran had thought it the perfect blend of elegance and functionality. It was classy enough for the black-tie supper that was held after the Worlds, and it was a dress she could fight in, if she had to. Of course she had to have it.

She shook it out from her pack now, the fabric red and supple, with a glittery sheen. The bodice was actually a sleeveless leotard, with a scooped ballet neck and a plunging back. From the empire waist, the translucent red skirt hugged the line of her torso and floated away from hips in a graceful flare, falling to mid-calf. The dress was striking on Siaran's tall frame; it emphasized a feminine balance of strength and softness, and the fabric had the added benefit of rolling into her pack without a wrinkle.

Stepping into it, she felt ridiculously frail. Naked. The red dress would have been a standout at the Worlds. Here, it would only reveal the differences between her body and the hunters': despite her strength by her own race's standards, she was a wraith beside Rune's bulk. Instinctively, she wanted to hide that. She wished she'd packed a long coat.

She washed her face briskly from one of the taps with something that approximated water. Flicking her hands dry, she found the brush in her doc kit and brushed out her long hair, leaving it to fall back from her shoulders. It made her feel less exposed that way, and it covered up the bandages on her neck. Glad there was no mirror to make her lose her nerve, Siaran walked, still barefoot, to the door and pressed her palm to the plate beside it that was identical to the one out in the hall. The door slid back to reveal Rune waiting by the bulkhead opposite. His deep-set green eyes appraised her unblinkingly, while she curled her toes in self-conscious embarrassment and dropped her gaze to the grid floor.

"I can't wear high heels on this floor," she mumbled. "The only other thing I've got is hiking boots, and I'm not about to walk around looking like Tank Girl. I feel ridiculous enough." She raised her chin to glare at him, but jumped instead. Rune had again moved without her sensing it, and was standing inches away from her. Before she could recover, he put one hand on her shoulder and gave her a rough shake. The fingers squeezed, and Rune gave his head an odd, quick shake, chin lifting briefly to expose a pale throat, long hair swinging around his shoulders. Siaran had no idea what it meant, although she was learning by now that any sort of contact from the hunters that didn't involve immediate death or dismemberment was not wholly negative.

Letting her go, Rune turned abruptly and led the way along the passages. Siaran kept half a pace behind, trying to memorize their path. When at last they arrived before a wide door that slid silently aside to reveal a galley and a long table, she was reasonably sure that she could find her way back to her room.

The galley was furnished in the same Spartan simplicity as her sleeping quarters, just slightly more brightly lit; blue-white light mingled with red, making the mess hall slightly less sinister and gloomy. Still, the walls were unadorned, and the heavy table was made more for strength than beauty. The complement of eleven warriors—apparently the ship's full crew—was already seated in high-backed, armless chairs. All of them turned to look at the late arrivals, and Siaran resisted the urge to hide behind Rune.

As if he sensed her hesitation, the predator growled and seized her around the upper arm. His hand was so big that his fingers overlapped to the second joint. He gave Siaran's arm a little shake of admonishment and propelled her to an empty chair. With a scowl, Siaran yanked her arm away and sat down. Rune took the empty seat beside her and again made his sibilant, rattling laugh.

She felt more like a scolded child than ever when she realized the chair was too high. Her long legs dangled, leaving her bare toes inches off the floor. The other members of Rune's clan rumbled—in greeting, she hoped, not disapproval—and picked up the long spearlike utensils, two of which lay beside each plate. These were as long as Siaran's forearm, slightly curved, with a razor edge to the concave side. One end was a handle, and the other ended in two sharp tines.

Siaran, seated on Rune's right, watched how the warrior handled the utensils and did her best to imitate. Wielding one in each fist, Rune joined his brothers in carving thick slabs from the roast set on a platter at the center of the table. The meat was char on the outside and pink on the inside, dripping juices and blood, and its shape and size gave Siaran no clue as to the animal it had once been part of, except that it must have been massive; the roast was almost as big as a side of beef. It smelled good, it was more or less cooked, and she was hungry. That was good enough.

She had to stand in order to reach the platter, and made no bones about doing so. At the rate her strange new allies were carving up the meat, it was either dig in or starve. Using one of the tined blades as a knife and the other as a fork, she managed to cut herself two thick slices and sat back, flushed with success. It was exhilarating, in a weird way—like being part of a wolf pack and fighting for her fair share of a kill. Although, she did pause long enough to wonder what a typical family meal would be like for these hunters, if this was a formal supper. Fistfights, probably.

This amusing train of thought was interrupted when Rune speared an inch-thick hunk of dripping flesh and tucked it between his mandibles. The four tusks held the food in place so his sharp teeth could bite at their leisure. Which they did, until about ten seconds later the meat, which Siaran estimated to be roughly the size of a porterhouse steak, was gone.

Unsure whether to be impressed or disgusted, Siaran raised the dainty morsel she'd cut for herself and inserted it into her mouth, careful of the sharp tines. The meat was rich, almost buttery, and without seasoning it was overlain by a pungent flavor that reminded her of venison. Edible, she decided; but it was lucky she liked her steak rare. It was also lucky she'd cut herself two slices. The haunch was reduced to bone and gristle before she'd finished her first piece. Siaran ate quickly after that, conscious of the curious stares from her tablemates, which made the meat go down like sawdust if she dwelt too long on their interest. Despite their seeming acceptance and disinclination to harm her, their fearsome appearance and size still startled her. How must she look to them, sitting there with her bare feet swinging, pushing little inch-square bites into her mouth?

There was water to drink, to her relief; poured from a large jug into odd-shaped glasses with flaring rims. Siaran had difficulty figuring out how to drink without spilling, but applied herself diligently to the task. She would have to learn, and her mouth was very different from the hunters'. It was either this or carry her water bottle with her all the time.

The eleven hunters must have been waiting for her to finish, because as soon as she did, they rose and beckoned for her to come with them. Siaran did so without hesitation, following as they led the way once more through the dimly-lit corridors. Their destination made her blink in surprise. The floor was a geometric rectangle, twice as long as it was wide, with a bare stretch of floor and a row of targets on heavy bases lined up along one side wall. The room's purpose was unmistakable.

"It's a _do jang_," Siaran whispered. _Dojo_ in Japanese; training hall by any other name. The relief that went through her at the sight of something so familiar made her forget everything else. She stepped around the tall hunters for a better look. Smiling, she curled her toes appreciatively into the floor's rough, springy surface. It felt like an all-weather track, only slightly more pliable.

A moment later, she was not smiling as she faced eleven predators who lined up shoulder to shoulder along the length of the room. Mouths snarling, smooth muscles knotting beneath speckled hides and close fitting leather, they shook their heads in a ritual sort of movement. The sound of hundreds of metal beads clicking together was like a death knell. Siaran backed hastily to the door. Intelligent beast-eyes glared at her, stopped the notion of running half-formed in her mind. She began to sweat.

A human can embody opposing concepts, like implacability and yielding, without hypocrisy. Sometimes, this duality is crucial to leading a balanced life. Facing the eleven predators, Siaran could sense in them no concept of dual purpose, of yielding or mercy. There was no softness in them, no relenting. They were threat and menace, as pitiless as time, all bone and iron sinew and pure killing drive.

When they began to move, fear was replaced by wonder. As before on the desert plain, watching two samurai-predators fight the black dragons, Siaran could only watch in fascination. At first, she thought they were performing a ritual dance, so effortless and graceful were their movements. But it wasn't a dance. It was a battle. The predators leaped and whirled with a precise power that belied the mass of their bodies. A mock battle, rehearsed to perfection, every step and strike honed to great effect.

Martial arts competitions have four categories: sparring, weapons, breaking, and forms. Siaran was looking at a form. The hunters were so many, and their movements were so quick, that she could only follow a fragment of the moves, blocks, and strikes. Just like the hunters' actual combat, it was beautiful to watch and humbling to emulate. They moved together as beautifully as clockwork, and finished as they had begun, shoulder to shoulder, facing the door. All that explosive power was again quiescent within bodies that looked too bulky to move the way they had.

At a loss, Siaran just stared at them for a moment. Then she bowed, head and eyes down, as a martial artist bows to show humility and respect to one of greater rank and ability.

The hunters cleared the floor as quickly as they had filled it. One of them stopped in the doorway beside her: Rune. Already she could pick him out from the others, though they all still looked much alike to her. She supposed that was self-preservation; while the other ten had shown her some level of acceptance, Rune was the one who had marked her face and brought her here, who seemed to have some vested interest in her welfare.

Then Rune pushed her out alone onto the mat. Confused, Siaran turned back to him, mouth open to argue. She faced eleven predators who lined the wall and blocked the exit, and watched her stonily. Rune barked a command, and swept both hands outward, fingers splayed, at the empty room.

Comprehension hit. They had demonstrated for her. Now it was her turn. Siaran looked around the training hall, felt the grippy surface under her bare feet. Bare feet were right; she always performed in bare feet, even when sparring. But nothing else was. The dress...

Suddenly, the reason for their formal garments became clear. That thin, supple leather didn't hinder their movements the way armor did. Armor was protective, necessary. One didn't need it for demonstrating a choreographed battle. For that, one needed clothing it was easy to move in.

They weren't wearing tuxedos. They were wearing training clothes, or maybe demo uniforms. Her first impulse, to wear her _do bohk_, had been the right one. Instead, brainiac that she was, she had worn a dress. And now she was expected to demonstrate her fighting abilities to them in it.

"No," she said. "Oh, no. Rune...I made a mistake." She plucked at her skirt and shook her head, beseeching. He didn't respond, except to growl deep in his throat when he saw that she might attempt a getaway.

"Oh, god," said Siaran. Her despair was met with silence. She was not getting out of this. On a level that went deeper than thought, she was dimly aware that they had done her an honor by allowing her to see them execute that choreographed battle. And even her confused consciousness knew how much the hunters banked on honor and fearlessness. She would have to forget about the stupid dress, and give them what they wanted.

So she turned her back on them, facing the wall, buying time to center and calm herself. Experimentally, she flexed her muscles, testing flexibility and resilience. It was almost always a bad idea to go into a form cold. Yet the hunters had, and she dared not take the time to stretch lest that suggest weakness.

To her relief, her body felt warm and vibrant, certainly more than usual after a meal and a long sleep. Maybe the meat had had some kind of endorphin in it. Siaran closed her eyes and breathed in steadily, then counted her exhalation to eight. She let her competitive spirit rise, using it deliberately to overcome humiliation and fear.

Taking one more quick breath, her mind now empty in the state of _mu shim_ so critical to heightened combat performance, Siaran whirled to face an audience she no longer consciously saw. Her feet were balanced perfectly, shoulder width apart, fists thrust in front of her at belt level. The muscles in her bare arms showed through her skin, all smooth ridges and hollows. Her long hair swung with the movement and the red skirt swirled around her legs. "_Chil hyung_," she cried, and began to move.

_Chil hyung._ Seventh form. Eighty-two steps with almost three hundred moves, performed in about two minutes. It was the most complex and demanding form Siaran knew, one that had taken her six months to master. It began simply, with a block, as all traditional Korean forms must. The philosophy was to begin any motion, however ultimately destructive, in self-defense. From that first block, a flurry of strikes, open hand, closed fist, ridge hand that swung with the hips for extra power, pivot; feet snapped together, a brief moment of stillness, then a feinted fall to doge a blow that ended in a rolling scissor kick, only to spring up again on the uppercut.

The rote movements came swift and sure, and Siaran began to enjoy the form, playing up the suspense with pauses and putting extra effort into the explosive movements, especially the high kicks from a low stance that were among her greater strengths. She felt like she was soaring when she launched into the tornado kick sequence, landing each 360-degree whirling kick balanced on the ball of her foot and turning into the next one without a pause. From there, she dropped lightly to the ground with most of her weight on her hands, cheek almost touching the floor as she looked over her shoulder and thrust back with a vertical side kick, aiming for her invisible opponent's groin. The stupid skirt slid all the way up to her hip, but Siaran was beyond worrying about that now. She spun low to recover and rose in a defensive crouch, hands whipped up into a high knife hand block. Without looking back, she jumped backward and twisted one and a half revolutions midair, landing with the same stance and block but this time facing the hunters. She put all her speed and strength into the final crescent kick, stinging her own hand with the slap of her foot and roaring a mighty _ki-hap_ from the belly when she dropped to one knee and delivered the killing blow to the throat with a straight downward punch.

So involved had she been in the form that she felt dazed when she recovered back into the ready stance. She relaxed, shaking out the tension in her arms and pushing sweaty locks of hair out of her eyes. Unsure what was expected of her now, Siaran tried to look unconcerned as she walked off the mat, watching the hunters from beneath lowered lids.

When she reached them, the warriors closed ranks around her. She was breathing hard after the demands of the form, but she held still as each of them touched a claw to the mark on his forehead, then her own. "I thought you guys were pretty good too," she murmured, so awed by the contact she almost forgot to breathe. Rune alone didn't touch her, and when her eyes found his face in the crowd of other scary faces, he contracted his forehead and the skin that stretched between his upper mandibles in a snarl.

The gesture of respect complete, the hunters filed out of the training hall. Rune alone stayed behind, considering the human who sweated and stood in brave defiance, glaring at him as he glared at her. Siaran was the one to break eye contact, turning her head to look after the departing hunters. Surely the demonstrations were done. "Can I go now?" she asked, sliding her eyes back to Rune.

By way of answer, he seized her wrist and pulled her back onto the rough-rubber floor, making his slow, rattling chatter all the while. When he let go, he crouched into a fighting stance, clawed fingers splayed, eyes pinioning her in silent command. Tusk and claw ready, seven and a half feet of fighting muscle against her bone-lean hundred and thirty-five pounds. No matter that he had every advantage of strength, weight, height, and reach; there was no mistaking the light in Rune's eyes. He wanted to spar.


	8. Be Water, My Friend

**Chapter 8 – Be Water, My Friend**

Her eyes flickered, restless, seeing in flashes the long black curving nails, the reach and power of the speckled forearms, the shoulders more than twice the width of her own; tusk, fang, claw; thick reptilian skin, smooth muscles. She remembered the grace and the power and the speed, and she knew she was going to lose. Probably painfully.

It wasn't the pain Siaran feared. At least, not superficially. She'd broken fingers, toes, ribs, and both wrists in sparring matches before, and knew how to disconnect pain to an extent. No. It was the knowledge, the certainty, that in this match, the odds were stacked too high. Because of her own stupidity, Rune probably thought that the dress was her normal fighting outfit. Judging by his prior reaction, she doubted she'd be able to convince him to let her go back to her room to change into her heavy canvas _do bohk_, which at least would provide some protection against his clawed fingers and toes.

There was also no question of backing down. It was already apparent to her that to do so could lose her whatever small respect she's managed to earn. She would have to fight Rune, and she would have to bear the loss with courage. That would be harder than it seemed; the certainty of loss did nothing for her confidence.

It did, however, make her angry. The very idea of not being able to control the outcome of any given action was enough to make her spitting mad.

But did she still have a choice, anyway? A thought surfaced as she stood staring at Rune, who was now clicking continuously, sounding like the dry, rapid rattle played just before a gunfight in a cheesy Western.

_Forget about winning and losing. Forget about pride and pain. Let your opponent graze your skin, and you smash his flesh. Let him smash your flesh, and you break his bones. Let him break your bones, and you take his life. Do not be concerned with escaping safely. Lay your life before him._

Bruce Lee's words, so often repeated by Siaran's instructors that they were like a mantra before an important match, came back to her now to chill and alter her fury over the fight's injustice, just as water cools and tempers the blacksmith's hot steel.

Siaran planted her right leg behind her, so that her right side, and not incidentally her liver, were protected. Most of her weight was on that foot, which allowed her to snap the front foot up quickly. She raised her hands: left to protect her face, right to protect her ribs and solar plexus. Her heart was already beating hard and she had to remind herself to slow down her breathing so she wouldn't use up the vital oxygen her muscles would need. She would have to hit and kick harder than she ever had in any sparring match if she was to even hope to hold her own here. She knew it. She'd seen Rune fight.

She pushed away fear, pushed away the futile wish for a weapon to even the score, pushed away everything except awareness and focus and the readiness to react and counteract as soon as Rune moved.

"Let's do this," she said, between her teeth.

_Do not be concerned with escaping safely._

Rune lunged, fingers open to slash or grab.

She saw it coming and sidestepped, on the principle that the best way not to get hit was not to be in the way of a punch. He passed so close she could smell his skin, and quick, _quick_, she smashed her knee into the softer flesh of his belly, just below the ribs. Rune grunted in surprise and she danced away, circling, alert for an opening. It was imperative that she stay out of his grasp. She didn't know the hunters' rules of sparring combat and had already decided to abandon the strict rules of Tae Kwon Do, which would have penalized her for that knee strike. It would be stupid not to use everything she knew. There could be no holding back here, no secret technique reserved for next time. For all she knew, even a mock-fight like this could be to the death among Rune's people. So there was only the fight, and if her choice was loss, well, she'd inflict as much pain as she could before he took her down.

He came at her again, in a weaving motion so she couldn't predict from which side his attack would come. This time, Siaran couldn't dodge the blow, stiffened fingers aimed at the left side of her head. Instead, she stepped into the strike, cutting down Rune's effective power, and met him as hard as she could, swinging her right arm across her face with the fist raised: an outside-to-inside block that connected the meat of her forearm to the hunter's wrist.

The blow numbed her to the shoulder, he hit so hard. Siaran could feel the wrench and strain in her rotator cuff and then she was dancing back again, shaking her fingers to try to restore feeling and gauge the level of the damage. Nothing broken or dislocated, but she was not going to be able to do that block again tonight. Dammit. Still, she'd stopped him. Rune pivoted, arms swept wide and mandibles flaring, to face her. Siaran didn't wait. There was no point in aiming a kick at his unprotected head or neck; he was too tall for her to have any power on those targets even though she was capable of kicking that high.

Instead, she twisted on her right heel, turning it directly toward the hunter and pushing her upper body horizontal and away from him, cocked her left knee briefly to her chest and then lashed straight back with that foot. She thrust as hard as she could and felt the shock as her heel connected solidly in the middle of his chest. Her satisfaction lasted only briefly because the force of her kick, which made Rune stagger back no more than a half step, was great enough to rebound and shove her forward onto her hands. She scrambled to regain her balance. The rush of displaced air behind her sent Siaran rolling instinctively to one side. Rune had dived at her, and missed by inches as she rolled, but he was fast. When she started to roll again, frantic to regain her feet, he was on her.

Clawed hands grabbed her sore right shoulder and dragged her like a sack of grain across the floor. Resisting the instinct to curl into a ball, Siaran locked eyes with Rune. He pulled her beneath him and she kept her knees tight to her chest until he squatted down far enough that she could plant her feet on his hips, feeling the pelvic bones sharp beneath her soles, and shove. Her lower back screamed with the effort of keeping his weight off her. Rune raised one hand, opened the fingers, and brought it swiftly down toward her neck, intending to grab her by the throat. But Siaran had already gone for his face, and her straight arms prevented him reaching that target.

Reckless now, expending all her strength because there was nothing left to save it for, Siaran caught the web of skin on Rune's lower mandibles in her left hand. Her right hand grabbed a handful of the smooth black braids that sprouted from his left temple, and with a sudden twist, she shoved up with her left hand and yanked down on his hair with her right. The trick to overawing something with superior strength, like a horse, lay in controlling its head. Where the head went, the body must follow, or risk mortal injury.

Rune, she found out quickly, was no horse.

She managed to twist his head, and the pressure forced him to raise the right side of his upper body, freeing her legs. But she hesitated, unused to ground fighting and afraid to let go because she hadn't managed to dislodge him completely. Instantly, he took advantage of that hesitation, wrapping her in a bear hug and rolling into the direction she was pushing his head, onto his back. She lost her hold and tried to bend her elbows to hammer them into his face or neck, but Rune was crushing her against his chest and she could get no leverage. Arms pinioned, Siaran dug her knees into his belly and fought like a wildcat to be free. It was no use; she was slowly strangling, and if he increased the pressure of his arms, he would crack her ribs like matchsticks.

She went utterly limp, felt the constriction increase for one awful second as Rune's grip tightened over muscles that no longer resisted. With a growl, he let go at once and pushed her onto her back. Siaran's head lolled, her eyes mere unseeing slits. When he bent over her, she snapped her left fist up as hard as she could, aiming a punch straight at his throat.

He caught her arm easily with her knuckles a bare inch away from contact.

Siaran opened her eyes wide, and Rune's other hand smacked her hard in the side of the head. He let her go and stood up, and after a moment she stood also, her head still ringing from the blow. She watched him warily for a minute, breathing hard, but it seemed the match was over. Still seething from that slap, she refused to bow to him as she would a human opponent, even though she knew, on some level, that her attempt at trickery deserved retribution. She felt wobbly and exhausted, and every joint and muscle ached with exertion.

Rune made a few clicks of disgust and stood to his full height, shaking back his long locks with the same quick motion of his head that Siaran had seen him do in her room before dinner. The overall effect was of a fighting creature glorying in triumph, and Siaran realized that the headshake was a gesture of victory. Well, sure; he had won. In fact, based on how quickly he'd blocked her last punch, she suspected he'd been toying with her all along, seeing what she could do.

From the safe distance between them, Siaran raised her chin. Frightened though she was of Rune half the time, it burned her to know that he'd held back enough to get her measure. It meant she didn't have his, and that was a disadvantage she couldn't afford. Her breathing was almost normal again, and some of her strength was returning.

"Again," she said, voice flat in the soundproof training hall. She resumed her fighting stance, knees bent, weight back, hands raised. The long skirt of her dress stuck to her sweaty legs and her hair was a tangled mess. Rune stared and Siaran beckoned to him with her fingers, taunting him. The big predator gave a satisfied grunt and charged.

He beat her faster the second time.

Siaran dodged the first rush once more and swept a roundhouse kick at Rune's midsection as he went past, but his claws snagged the hem of her skirt and jerked the leg she was standing on out from under her. She landed hard on her back, winded. Not beaten yet, for Siaran had learned something about Rune's ground-fighting technique after all, she avoided his attempt to pin her beneath superior weight by executing a backward somersault—thank god she had practiced rolls and falling all winter. But once again, Rune's hand caught at her skirt, and she pitched forward onto her face when he gave it a yank, claws rending the stretchy fabric. From there, it was an easy thing to pin her by the back of the neck with his other hand pressed onto her lower back, until she submitted by slapping the mat.

She struggled to her feet, red-faced, coughing, rotating her sore neck and grateful that he'd recognized the tap-out for what it was. The pressure he could exert was scary.

"Shit." She coughed again, swallowed, tasted blood from a split lip. A gentle finger slid around her gums came out bloody but assured her that all her teeth, at least, were still there. Her pride was another matter.

Rune stepped up to her, stood over her, barked a command. But Siaran backed away, eyes not meeting his, palms up and out in refusal. She was used to sparring with a mouthguard, shin pads, and a padded helmet. The inappropriate dress was no real excuse; she was going to have to get a lot tougher. After watching her for a moment longer as she kept her eyes on the mat, Rune gave a hissing rattle into which she read disappointment, and stalked out of the training hall without a backward glance.

Siaran stayed. She rolled one of the heavy targets out onto the floor and knocked it down again and again with a variety of side kicks—stepping, spinning, flying—until her legs were too fatigued to lift high enough. Then she used her hands, focusing especially on spinning back fists and elbow smashes and ridge hand strikes. All were powerful techniques that deceived the eye and could be executed with great speed. She would need it, she figured, to stand toe to toe with Rune or any of the others. She would have to enhance her few advantages: her size presented a smaller target, she believed she had greater joint flexibility, and when it came to snapping a kick or punch, superior speed. Rune's successful moves against her had been due to greater experience, size, and strength; but she had seen all of them coming. Learning his techniques would be key, and if Siaran was in fact quicker, that might one day give her an edge.

Later, she made her way to her room and discarded the ruined dress in favor of the black canvas pants and a long-sleeved running top. Taking her water bottle with her, Siaran wandered the empty corridors until she found the control room, meeting no one along the way. Unsure whether to be relieved or apprehensive at the lack of hunter presence, she stood there awhile, looking through the forward screen at the stars. The throb of the engines was quieter this far forward, replaced by the hum of computers. The control room had no chairs, not even in front of the computer banks. Sipping from the bottle, Siaran padded silently across to the nearest holographic display.

Random patterns showed in red on the flat readout beside the display: numbers or letters in the hunters' own language. They made no sense, so Siaran turned back to the 3-D image that hovered, about a foot square, over the panel. After frowning at the way the stars in the display shifted and rotated, then collapsed back into something vaguely familiar, all the while showing a constant blue-white curving line that seemed aimed at a particular spot, she thought she knew what she was looking at. It was a map of their destination, and when the view pulled back to show the stars from a distance, she could clearly see the constellation of Orion.

Siaran was no astronomy buff, but Orion was easily recognizable. And if the line of light was the ship's trajectory, they were on their way to a spot near the lower left star in the bright constellation. She swallowed, turning the water bottle over and over in her hands as she thought. How long would it take to cross that distance? As far as she knew, the stars in Orion were not among those closest to Earth. Just how fast was the ship capable of traveling? It had to be faster than light, or else the hunters would have spent their entire lives, or even lifetimes, traversing the distances between even neighboring suns. Was the Orion area the hunters' point of origin, or something else?

When at length she left the bridge to seek her quarters and the oblivion of sleep, Siaran reckoned she had more questions than when she had come on board, and still no way of getting them answered.

The subdued lighting flickered on when she palmed the doorplate and entered. The interior was the same: spare and ascetic, a wonderful study for meditation with nothing to distract the mind. But it was not as she had left it. Her pack was empty, lying discarded on the floor. Most of the items that had been in it were missing, and all that was left was laid out on the bed: leather doc kit, plastic first aid box, the black-trimmed blue canvas jacket of her martial arts _do bohk_, a pair of running tights, her uniform belt, and the stretchy tanksuit she habitually wore beneath the jacket to prevent chafing from wet t-shirt hems. Also, her hiking boots and a couple pair of hiking socks. That was all. The ruined dress, and all her underwear and pajamas and changes of normal clothing, were gone.


	9. Conditioning

_Note: This chapter may contain incongruities with yautja methods of interstellar travel. Because I have not seen all the Predator movies, nor read any of the franchise's comics or books, I have no idea whether there is information to be had on this topic. It's possible that yautja use suspended animation on long voyages; but to include that would damage my story arc, so I've dug my toes in and am sticking with what I know. I hope the more hard-core Predator fans out there can forgive this oversight; I will try not to make many._

_My understanding of how tachyons work comes from a half-forgotten college astronomy class. Reference to Planck length as a possibility for faster-than-light travel is derived straight from Dan Simmons' "Hyperion" series. It is my fond hope that anyone who reads this and has a better grasp of quantum theory than my own extremely rickety one will correct what are probably many wild inaccuracies about the predator ship's drive. Not that this is an important locus of the story; I just get nervous when I step beyond my own knowledge._

_Thank you all for the thoughtful and surprisingly positive reviews. I hope you look forward to reading each addition as much as I do to your comments; that would be awesome indeed._

* * *

**Chapter 9 – Conditioning**

It wasn't worth it. Sometimes you just had to pick your battles and cut your losses. The hunters had nothing if not a sense of purpose, however much it might fail to make sense to Siaran. No doubt this unsanctioned downsizing of her wardrobe had its own place in some mysterious, alien master plan. Besides, she thought with a yawn as she crawled onto the bed, she was too sore and tired to track down Rune and try to make him understand how rude it was to take someone else's stuff without asking.

She slept like a rock, curled among all the material possessions that remained to her. When she awoke, a routine began that kept her occupied during the long interstellar voyage.

It was hard at first, but not in all the ways she expected. First, there was the matter of filling her belly. Siaran had to do a lot of talking and gesticulating to convince the hunters that she needed to eat several times a day. Apparently their normal eating pattern was to gorge every two or three days, so she ended up taking most of her meals alone. She figured the diet of red meat would soon begin to pall; but in the meantime, there was nothing better for building lean muscle. And she needed a lot of that.

Her primary function aboard the vessel became training, both by her own design and the hunters' mandates. There was no real day or night on board, just alternating cycles of red-blue dimness and total darkness. Most of the time Siaran spent awake involved either eating or training. Each time she ate, she consumed thousands of calories to make up for the increased demands she was placing on her body. The training was a punishing series of drills and sparring designed, she often repeated to herself with a wry smile, to make her faster, stronger, and meaner.

Often at the end of a day cycle, she climbed into her tank of fluid with her shins and forearms a mass of knotted bumps from repeated impact, livid bruises forming on her thighs, upper arms, and torso. Sometimes she bled; long superficial gashes from a hunter's claws, and then her blood mixing with the lemony effervescent liquid stained her bath orange. Every time she woke, she had to hobble around the room for a few minutes, easing stiff and abused muscles until she could move properly.

At first, the increased duration and effort of combat training session were pure hell, and she feared her lesser bone and muscle structure would not stand up to the abuse; as far as she could tell, the hunters gave her no breaks for being smaller, lighter, weaker, or a different species. But she was more resilient than she'd known. To some degree, her body was already used to such treatment; years of martial arts combined with the genetic blessing of quick recovery allowed Siaran to endure, and eventually to thrive on, the higher physical tempo the predators' training required.

The learning and training blunted her from the worst effects of the isolation rendered by the communications gap and culture barrier. And any spare time she might have used to wonder about the larger purpose of all this training was soon consumed by a more immediate worry.

Jackal.

Soon after that first humbling match with Rune and Siaran's discovery of her missing effects, the hunters had gathered in what seemed to be a trophy room and divided themselves into four groups. Siaran had circled the room during this process, feeling slightly out of place and not really useful. She was fascinated, and a little appalled, by the collection of skulls, spinal columns, weapons, and artifacts arrayed on shelves and looming out from the walls. Some of these were so distorted they were unrecognizable; some had undeniably and disturbingly once belonged to humans.

So mesmerized was she by what had to be a thirteenth-century _katana_, a samurai weapon, that she nearly shrieked when Rune laid a large, clawed hand on her shoulder and pulled her back. Siaran darted out of his grasp, retreated across the middle of the floor, and rammed straight into another hunter. Steel-band arms encircled and held her before she could turn to apologize. The hunter squeezed so hard that she tensed her ab muscles against that awful grip for fear her ribs would crack. Long tubelike braids fell around her head as the hunter behind her lowered his head beside hers, opened his mandibles wide, and grazed her cheek with the long tusks.

Breath puffed on her cheek, hot and sickly with the stench of raw meat. A growl rumbled in his chest, vibrating against her back, then became the trademark rattling laughter. Stretching his mandibles wider, the hunter bit into the flesh above Siaran's cheekbone, drawing pinpricks of blood. She stood absolutely still, eyes enormous and dark with fear, fixed on Rune through the curtain of the other hunter's hair. Rune met her gaze impassively, then flexed his fingers in a dismissive gesture.

Abruptly, the other hunter let go, shoving her away none too gently with a snort of derision. Siaran whirled, hands open and ready, to face him. He was taller than Rune but not so deeply chested, with longer braids ornamented with colored beads and tiny bones, as well as the metallic bangles Rune wore in his own locks. No more or less ugly than any of the others, her antagonist had a cocky, pugnacious stance that Siaran recognized at once. She backed away from him.

Again, Rune stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. The rest of the warriors were watching them alertly. He growled at them; Siaran thought she heard a placating note, almost a purr, in his voice. With a sharper rapid click, Rune kept his hold on her shoulder and pulled her closer to the big hunter who'd grabbed her. She stiffened, but to her surprise Rune clasped her antagonist's shoulder with his other hand, then gave them both a brief shake.

Only then did Siaran realize that all the groups were comprised of three members each, and that she had been included, perhaps to keep the groups balanced. In any large group of social animals, there tended to be one individual who enjoyed persecuting any perceived weakness in the others. A jerk, an unrelenting asshole, a bully. It was just Siaran's luck that she was now part of such an individual's group. She glared at Rune, dismayed and furious at having this thrust upon her, but the hunter ignored her silent accusation.

She nicknamed the bully Jackal right then, because his breath smelled like carrion and because a jackal's slinking, thieving ways were right up his alley. A pattern grew in the next few hours of that first day that became a regular function so strict it was almost law. Each group trained on an independent schedule, rotating the training hall so that it was almost always in use by one of the four teams. Except for the irregular feeding-frenzy meals, the hunters spent their time exclusively with their group mates: training, fighting, learning each other's strengths and weaknesses and exploiting and adapting those so that the three members of the group began to function as a cohesive hunting force more effectively than any one of them could alone.

Siaran understood what was supposed to happen. Trust and brotherhood and guarding each other's backs; the structure of an effective military combat unit. At some point, she guessed, each team of three would be sent out on some dangerous hunt or objective. The best chances of success lay in their ability to work together and a deep knowledge of how the other two members of one's group fought and reasoned.

If that were so, then Siaran's group was dysfunctional. She mistrusted Jackal from the start, and he in turn treated her with the sort of superior contempt a bully has for an outsider or a weakling. Siaran began gradually to understand his motivations through his actions, but nothing she could do convinced Jackal that she was anything but a weak member of a lesser species, little more than an animal. A curiosity to be tampered with until it broke. Proud and stubborn, Siaran refused to submit to his constant hounding, and that made her predicament worse. Rune either did not notice or chose to ignore the conflict between Siaran and Jackal. While Siaran was painfully aware of her status as low man on the totem pole, there was no discernible seniority between her teammates. Jackal was probably older, to judge by the broader head with its more pronounced bony protrusions and longer hair. But Rune had the more even temperament, which logically made him the better leader.

Unable to communicate in any sophisticated way, she didn't understand the goal of team training, and did her best to follow Rune's heavy-handed instruction to the letter, hoping she would learn more along the way, and also not mess up badly enough to incur any more of Jackal's wrath than she had to. She practiced moving without a sound, and crept along through the ship's corridor for what felt like hours, learning to blending into shadows, quieting her breath so that she could not hear its whisper even in a silent room. She practiced climbing fast, relying on momentum to propel her to the top of structures without stopping, eyes sweeping ahead to spot and avoid a potential weak hold.

And always, there was sparring. Siaran, whose style had always been to keep her opponents at bay with her longer reach and then overpower them by virtue of superior height and strength, suddenly found the tables turned; the hunters used those exact same advantages against her. It was a struggle, both mentally and physically, to break out of the methodology that had served her so well for so long. Many times over, she found herself silently thanking her masters and instructors, who had told her through all her years of training to be humble enough to discard without hesitation any technique that didn't work, and flexible enough to learn a new one the way a beginner learns: quickly and without prejudice.

Rune pushed her, showing no mercy when she revealed weakness. From him, Siaran learned greater balance and patience. He was a master of sacrifice, absorbing a kick or punch to some non-vital part of his anatomy in order to get close enough to deliver the _coup de grace_. "You'd make a good chess player," she often told Rune as she lay panting on the mat after he had once again borne the brunt of her attack and overpowered her. When she said that, Rune would put his head to the side, and the small movement, so reminiscent of a human gesture, would bring with it a welcome rush of warm familiarity.

She began almost to look forward to sparring Rune; he was tough but fair, and she learned quickly that he would push her failure only to a point, then give her a chance to recover and try again. She learned faster that way, avoided serious injury, and retained her natural buoyancy of spirit. The latter was maybe the most important; Rune seemed to know that repeated failure in the face of overwhelming odds might have led Siaran to cease trying. He was by instinct or experience a good teacher, and encouraged her in little ways. Sometimes he imitated the taunting "come hither" motion she'd used on him during their first match; the sight of his talons waggling at her always made her grin. Or he would toss his head at her, setting the magnificent crown of long braids into waterfall motion. But he'd do it after she'd land a particularly effective technique, which was incongruent with what she was sure was a gesture of self-importance. Gradually, she realized he was teasing her, and she began to respond. Stupid things, usually, schoolyard taunts: "That move was as ugly as your face, Rune," or "Dude, my grandmother can move faster than that." He'd click and rattle at her, laughing, and if Siaran didn't laugh with him, at least she smiled.

Those were the bright points of her difficult days. Jackal delighted in making her life wretched. Whatever respect he had shown her along with the other hunters on her first day aboard, after her form demonstration, had either been feigned or forgotten. Walking along the corridors to any given destination, Jackal would shoulder her painfully into doors or fall behind to yank her hair. Kid stuff, bully stuff, most of it. But it got worse. When he could catch her alone, he'd pin her to the wall and lower his face close to hers, sniffing and growling, flaring his mandibles in distaste. Sometimes he'd drag his talons obscenely across her breasts or belly before letting her go, all the while making a dry, rattling laugh that sounded lewd and sinister. She hated his laugh.

When they sparred, Jackal would wear her down, catch her, throw her, and pin her on her belly so fast she couldn't recover. Then, with a knee in her lower back, he would yank her head back and slide sharp black claws across her taut throat, rumbling menacingly. More often than not, he pricked beads of blood from her skin.

Once, early on, Jackal caught her foot mid-kick and flipped her hard onto her back, coming down to straddle her. He slid a hand between her legs and leaned over her, roaring in her face and twisting his head from side to side, mocking her powerlessness. Siaran knew, with the age-old knowledge of the primitive hindbrain, that there was nothing sexual in Jackal's display; it was a gesture of male contempt, brutal and full of hate. She glared back with an equal measure of hate, and hit him from the shoulder with the heel of her hand, dead between the eyes.

She woke up in a heap against the far wall, with a tennis-ball-sized lump over her right temple. Rune was standing over her. When he saw she was conscious, he pulled her to her feet. Then, without a flicker of apology or pity, he set her to blocking the revolving target, its thick wooden arms raised to swipe at her head.

Their antagonism was palpable. One day, after managing to kick out of a submission hold and bound to her feet, Siaran watched Jackal approach with snarling face and flexed claws, and said conversationally, "You know, Jackal, the more you fuck with me, the more I want to outlast you." He attacked with such fury she wondered if he'd understood her words.

To survive, she turned the whole thing into a game. However Jackal might hate it, Siaran was part of his team. She did not appeal to Rune, who did not seem to share Siaran's belief that Jackal would kill her without a thought if it took his fancy. In fact, she took from Rune the iron patience he displayed in training her, and set it against Jackal. She watched every move the big hunter made as carefully as if her life depended on it—which it might. She worked out how to avoid many of the snares he set for her. He devised new ones. He hurt her; she healed. She learned. The game was not to let Jackal's insolent disregard destroy her, and Siaran played in earnest.

The days went on. When she fought Jackal, it was always about evasion and subtle retaliation; saving her skin and doing her best to get in a jab before he flung her inevitably to the mat. When she fought Rune, she used speed and flexibility against his more honest strength, losing just as certainly but enjoying herself more. When Rune and Jackal fought, it was a thing of majesty and terror. They slammed each other against walls and slashed each other's flesh with clawed toes and fingers, leaving them dripping iridescent green. She could never tell who won.

Their cuts always healed cleanly; Siaran had never seen a trace of scar on either of them, save for the tribal mark on their foreheads and a few puckered areas that were clearly from much deeper, older wounds. By contrast, her own hide was always marred with scabs and bruises, half-healed and reopened. The astringent fluid in the tank was a wonderful restorative and became her new best friend.

She also washed her diminished wardrobe in the tank before she slept, scrubbing water and a kind of pasty soap through the fabric, rinsing it clean, then hanging it over the edge to dry in the jets of hot air. Her days were so regimented that she thought she knew the reason her belongings had been taken: an attempt to strip her to what was essential. The tank suit as base layer, running clothes as insulation, and the _do bohk_ as a sort of military uniform. That was it. She did wish Rune—she was convinced he was the one who'd taken her things, as no other hunter had ever been in her quarters as far as she knew—had consulted her first, though. She really missed her damn underwear.

Days passed, unknown hours controlled by the dim-up and dim-down of the lights. The cycles lengthened, grew into weeks. Siaran, already lean, lost weight. Her reaction times came down dramatically as her strength and speed increased, until she moved almost with the speed of reflex, without thought. Although she didn't know it, her bone density also increased, keeping pace with the growth of muscle and the repeated impacts of larger, stronger bodies against her frame. All she knew was that she could jump higher, run faster, and hit and kick harder than she'd ever thought she could. And, modesty aside, that was saying a lot. She'd already been world-class by Tae Kwon Do standards. What she was becoming kind of scared her sometimes.

Except for the sleep cycle, she was never alone. Rune and Jackal were constantly with her. They watched her when she ate; Rune in silence, Jackal restless and clicking and disapproving. She grew into the habit of waking before the lights came up, dressing quickly, and making her way to the training hall to meditate and stretch before her teammates came along to inflict the day's lessons and bruises. These quiet sessions became precious to her. During the few minutes of meditation, she could empty her mind of fear and worry, forget pain and uncertainty and loss. She would sit cross-legged and let go of all she had left behind and all she was heading toward, and simply _be_. It refreshed and strengthened her; it kept her in touch with herself, something that became increasingly vital, just as she'd suspected it would.

Sometimes she was taken to conferences where all eleven predators would click and bark and growl in their complex vocabulary. Comparing notes, Siaran imagined; getting ready for whatever lay ahead. These conferences were always held in the control room, and at first, Siaran amused herself by comparing the incredible view of space beyond the screen to the holographic projections of their progress and destination.

During one of the first such meetings, the stars went out. It was not long after they'd left Earth; maybe three or four days, by the light-dark cycle. Siaran felt the change in pitch of the ship's engines before she heard it, a peculiar buzz deep in her cochleae. She rubbed her ears, then yawned as if to equalize pressure, and the sound became audible. A winding-up sort of whine as the throb increased to a staccato so rapid it finally smoothed into one long, smooth, streaming pulse of sound. Wide-eyed, Siaran glanced at the hunters. They had paused in their conversations but, far from seeming alarmed, appeared only to be waiting patiently.

A flare of light from the forward screen distracted Siaran from the engine howl. She blinked, saw the light from the stars elongate into flares tipped at one end with a dot of red and at the other with a long blaze of blue. Then they winked out, leaving nothing to see but black. At the same time, there was a muffled-explosion sound from the engines and she felt a moment of bizarre pressure, as if something was squeezing her from the inside, constricting everything into one singular point just below her navel.

Then it was over. The throb of engines resumed, albeit with a different pitch. Siaran wriggled, but the brief internal pressure was gone. The viewport remained empty. Unconcerned, the hunters resumed their huddle.

The disappearance of the stars was standard procedure for the hunters, even if it astounded their human guest. Traveling just below the speed of light, the ship had taken four days to escape the gravitational pull of Earth's solar system. Free of the constant of gravity and all the problems it causes for quantum-mechanical operations, the ship could now ramp up the tachyon-producing engines that accelerated it, and all within it, safely past the speed of light. Utilizing technology grasped only on a theoretical basis by humans as the Planck-length scale, the predator ship now cruised at a rate more definable by time than by measurable speed, counting out to precise thousands the seconds to her destination, deep in the wilderness of the Orion Spur.

The energies produced by the ship's drive were akin to the terrible pressures of a black hole, which shreds matter and compresses light to the point that it becomes discontinuous with space and time. Without the protection of the quantum shields that permeated the ship, the slight pressure Siaran had experienced would have rent her to atoms, along with her eleven companions.

In the blissful ignorance possessed by all creatures of the moment, what Siaran feared most at the moment of FTL acceleration was her next encounter with Jackal. When the stars went out, she blinked and looked over at the holographic displays, which were as steady as ever. The only thing different was that all the stars had phased to blue.


	10. Copper Sun

**Chapter 10 – Copper Sun**

It had been a bad day. Even the most conditioned of athletes got them sometimes: a day where balance was just a little off, cues missed that should have been obvious, hair-trigger reactions a millisecond too slow.

He slammed Siaran to the mat for what felt like the twentieth time, or the fiftieth. Jackal, a snarl of disgust spreading his upper mandibles so that they almost obscured his deep-set eyes. She got up; too slowly, lacking her normal bounce. Jackal knocked her back down again, and this time wrapped his hand around her throat, nails pricking into the claw scars on the back of her neck, and squeezed. "Get _off_," she managed to say, but he tightened his grasp.

"Siarrran."

Feeling the blood pounding hot and fast in her temples, the restriction of her airflow, she bucked beneath him, bringing a knee up to drive deep into the soft flesh of his lower belly. He hissed but did not let go, and lying pinned, choking, unable to move, Siaran saw his other fist come down to smash her face.

She felt the wet splash of blood, shocking in its warmth; felt cartilage and bone crunch in her nose. Too shocked to feel any pain yet, she could only watch as Jackal raised his fist and hit her again. Fury, outrage, terror, helplessness. Her face laid open, bleeding and broken. He hit her again.

"Siarrran."

Jagged shards of teeth felt smooth when she darted her tongue over them. Her chest felt like it was going to explode if she didn't get air. She opened her mouth, opened her eyes, saw the darkness, drew a huge shuddering breath.

Heavy locks of woven hair fell around her, dropping into her face, across her mouth. Siaran struggled to quiet her breathing, trying not so sob audibly. At first, the nightmare remained so vivid in her mind that she couldn't remember why being quiet was imperative. Gradually, she recovered enough to note the presence of the hunter stooping over the bed, although she couldn't see him. The room was dark; the door closed. But she could feel the displacement of hands on the bed, and the tentacular hair still dragged across her face.

She was afraid to move for a few terrible seconds. She'd been dreaming—something horrible, something about Jackal, a nightmare continuation of the off day she'd had. Had she talked in her sleep and been overheard? She must have been deep in it—she'd never failed to wake up before on the rare occasion that Rune had entered her room before she was up.

The thought that her uninvited guest might be Jackal, not Rune, acted like a catapult on her body. Siaran was out of bed and crouched on the far side, away from the predator, in less than a second. "What are you doing?" she asked, hating the shrillness in her tone that betrayed her fright. Damn the coincidence of nightmare and night-stalking hunter, anyway. She didn't go sneaking into _their_ quarters in the dark.

The room's subdued lighting, cued as always to her voice, came up. Siaran stood up slowly, every muscle tense, and looked across the bed.

There was nobody there.

Frowning, she stepped around the high bed, half prepared to kick the intruder square in the big, ugly head as he crouched out of sight behind the bed. The floor was empty. The whole room was empty. And the door was still closed.

Siaran ran a hand over her face, still feeling her skin twitch from the tickling strands of hair. The nightmare had been vivid, horrifying, but...

"I wasn't dreaming," she said out loud to nobody. But maybe she had been. Maybe the long weeks, the intense training, the stress of dealing with Jackal every day, had taken their toll on her mind, and she was finally beginning to crack.

"No," she said stubbornly.

"Yesss."

She found herself across the room again, pressing her back into the solid reassurance of a corner. Her body was erect, her eyes as wide as a frightened rabbit's. Her heart slammed against her ribcage but she was alert, already feeling the adrenaline flow to her muscles, listening and watching as hard as she could.

"Siarrran."

There. Right beside the bed, right where the hunter had stood in the dark. The voice was a growling, rattling whisper, but very clear. She understood _yes_ and she understood _Siaran_ and even though those words were the first recognizable ones she'd heard spoken since she boarded the ship, she didn't understand their purpose or their origin and so they brought no joy. She was either having a powerful hallucination, or someone was messing with her.

"Come over here and say that," she called softly.

The someone did. She saw the movement as a ripple in the air, like a tall man-shaped shimmer of mirage or clear water running fast over gravel in the sunlight. It came toward her and she didn't know whether to be afraid or incredulous. Still out of reach, it stopped, and with stillness blended imperceptibly with the room again. Siaran cast around wildly, thrown off balance; she thought she knew where the thing had stopped, but her eyes were stubbornly telling her brain there was nothing there, so she began to doubt at once.

A sibilant, whispering chuckle, then blue-white arcs of lightning ran up and over the massive form of a hunter as he deactivated his shift suit. Rune stood before her, wearing the body-mesh remembered from their meeting in the Gobi, overlain with thick leather pads on shoulder, forearm, chest, and thigh. He held a bundle in one hand, and the bastard was _laughing_ at her.

"Oh, very funny." Siaran glared at him. She wanted to hit him.

"Verrry funny," Rune confirmed. He nodded once, head inclined to his chest.

She seethed. "_And_ you speak English? I've been babbling to myself to keep from going crazy, and all that time you could have talked to me anytime you wanted? That's just...that's..." spluttering, she waved both arms around in frustrated defeat. "You _jerk_."

Rune's mandibles twitched slightly, and from the jaws behind them came again that gargling, growling whisper, enunciating slowly and carefully. "You'd make a good chesss playerrr."

"What?" she stared. "That doesn't make—"

She stopped midsentence and just looked at him, trying to interpret his body language. He was relaxed, eyes glinting with something that might have been mischief.

"You still don't understand what I'm saying, do you?"

"You _jerrrk_."

On the other hand, the glint might have been malicious amusement. It was hard to tell.

"Good boy," Siaran muttered darkly, glowering at him. "You learn fast. Guess I should teach you all the swear words, huh, then you can really be top of your class."

"Shhit."

She stared. Rune cocked his head at her and gave a suspiciously smug-sounding trill of laughter.

Disconcerted by this new turn of events, and grouchy at being psychologically bested by the hunter twice over, Siaran changed the subject. "What's with the invisibility?" she asked, unable to help sounding impressed despite her mood. She remembered the ship having some sort of cloaking shield, but until now had not realized the hunters had adapted the same technology to their personal gear. She pointed at Rune, then swept both hands across her eyes as if erasing him from her sight. Looked left, looked right. "Invisibility. Scared me to death, thank you very much. Oh, and while we're on the subject, don't ever do it again." She glared, indignant all over again, remembering the terror of her dream and the confusion of waking to find him bending over her.

Rune rumbled at her, a low clicking growl with shades of a purr. Siaran tried to glare harder, refusing to be placated so easily.

Losing interest in the game, Rune thrust the bundle he was carrying at her. She caught it automatically, felt material that was at once slick and knobbly, and let it slide through her fingers, shaking out the folds. It was a mesh suit like the one he wore, and she saw to her surprise that the thick ropy strands were bound by some very fine, very thin transparent material. She tugged experimentally. Thin as gossamer, strong as silk.

"For me?" she eyed him in surprise.

Rune inclined his head to his chest.

"Not sure it's gonna fit," Siaran said dubiously, still chary of showing too much goodwill after his little prank. She consoled herself with the thought that at least she'd seen the distortion when he moved. The price of invisibility was stillness. She stored that away to think about later.

He made a softly dismissive click. "My ancessstorrrs went naked into batttle," he informed her, then turned his back on her, strode to the door, and palmed it open. From the doorway, he looked back and barked an imperative. A second later, Siaran was glaring only at the innocent door.

Still angry over the fright he'd given her, Siaran stomped into the bathroom and shook out the mesh suit. Cautiously, she lifted it to her nose: no trace of odor. There was no real reason to be suspicious of the thing, she reasoned; yet she hesitated to put it on. The events of the past few minutes—her nightmare, Rune's appearance in her room in no less than an invisibility suit, the revelation of his ability to mimic her own language—they made no sense in any context that she'd come to grasp in her time on the ship. She usually slept heavily, without remembering her dreams. Rune hadn't entered her quarters since her first day on board. And none of the hunters had shown the slightest inkling of understanding her language any more than she understood theirs.

Unanswerable questions, for now. Siaran set curiosity aside and rubbed the fabric between her fingers again, intrigued by the odd slippery texture of the underlying weave.

Finally, she stepped into the thing, muttering every expletive she knew under her breath as she did. Over the tank suit it went, and as she pulled it on, the strange fabric sealed to her skin like a weightless, jellied wetsuit. By the time she stuck her arms into the sleeves and settled the collar into place, her flesh was crawling at the strange sensation. The suit felt cool and slightly damp, and it didn't slide an inch as she twisted from side to side and bent to touch her toes. It was like being sealed inside a different skin. She could still feel the air currents against her flesh as she moved, but they were muted somehow, filtered. It also fit as if it had been tailored for her, although it had looked much bigger when she'd first held it up.

"Bizarre," Siaran whispered, and shook her head.

Both her groupmates were both out in the hall when she emerged. Siaran scowled, biting back a snappy comment at Rune in favor of giving a wide berth to her antagonist. Jackal reached out anyway to cuff her in the side of the head; she dodged, and Jackal came after her with a snarl of displeasure.

Rune interposed his body between them with a warning bark. His green eyes locked on Jackal's orange-yellow ones until the latter slid his gaze away and lowered his head. Both predators, now ignoring Siaran completely, moved off in the direction of the control room. She followed in silence, contemplating this brusque new Rune who spoke in her words and had, for the first time, put a stop to Jackal's amusing little attempts to brain her. They walked fast, in a hurry; she had to jog to keep up.

The control room was a hive of activity. The ship's lights were all on, although Siaran's internal clock told her that the sleep cycle was only about half over. The entire crew was gathered there. Some of them chattered a greeting as Siaran's group entered. The viewscreen, dark for so many weeks, again showed a field of stars. Strange stars, in patterns Siaran didn't recognize; and far fewer of them than she had seen when they'd first left Earth.

As before, three hunters manned each of the twin computers, slowing the ship down as it emerged from Planck space, coding, checking, and re-checking calculations that were beyond Siaran's comprehension. She watched with the rest as the wide field of view swung slowly and then settled with a single dim star at the exact center. A glance at the holograms confirmed that their trajectory's blue-white arrow ended at that star; or rather, at its third planet, which Siaran could see when one of the hunters manipulated the view to zoom closer.

The star itself was unimpressive; she doubted it could be seen from Earth if it was this faint so close to its own planet system. It burned in a dull tarnished sort of way, growing from a dim speck to a copper smudge to a discernible disc, closer but not much brighter.

The ship slowed even further as it entered the gravity field of the orangey-brown star, its engines switching completely to normal drive. While they had been able to emerge from Planck space much closer to this sun than to Earth's due to its reduced size, it would still be some time before they reached orbit around the destination planet. Hours, maybe a day. After that, maybe the purpose of all the intensive training would become clear.

The initial show over, the hunters turned from the screen, reforming into their trios by what was now force of long habit. Siaran stuck close to Rune and Jackal, waiting to see where they'd be off to next. The two were deep in conversation, and neither one appeared happy with what the other was saying. Rune finally gave her a doubtful look, snap-growled something at Jackal, and stepped back, finishing the exchange. Jackal chittered softly and tossed his head in triumph. That worried her. Any argument that Jackal won could mean nothing good for Siaran.

She stayed warily behind him as Rune led the way to a room she had passed many times but never yet entered. It had a heavy, reinforced door that stood out among the nondescript blank portals in the rest of the ship. Now she filed in, curiosity gaining the upper hand over concern. It was an armory, she saw at once. Along one wall was a row of faceplates, each with a glowing red digital tag beneath it. The adjacent wall held the lobsterlike silver armor: coverings for shoulders and arms and groin and thighs, spike-toed boots, studded fingerless gloves, and coiled power packs for breathable air or maybe weapons chargers.

Opposite the faceplates were the weapons. These were displayed in ranks and tiers by type. Gauntlets with extending double claws, gauntlets that fired vicious little sharp projectiles, knives, retractable flying discs, spears, net guns, long-handled short swords, shoulder-mounted plasma cannon; row after row of shining metal death. Some of the weapons she'd seen before, in the desert with Rune. Some she had no name for.

She stepped closer to the shining deadly objects, heart beating high in excitement that was not entirely due to a martial artist's love of balanced and well-made weapons. There was a subdued violence about the predators. This was the first stage of the next hunt, and already they were growing restless, eager to be on the trail of the strange new quarry their elders had chosen. Siaran had spent so much time with them that she sensed their mood changes now without being consciously aware of it, and she responded in kind to this new alertness in them.

Jackal and Rune selected faceplates. Rune's was the same one he'd worn before, its only marking the twisting symbol in the center of the skull cover, the scars and pits of battle polished over but still showing. Jackal's was ornately carved to resemble some sort of snarling carnivore, clearly made to look as fierce as possible. Siaran discreetly rolled her eyes; she'd have expected no less. Humility was not in Jackal's vocabulary.

Their armor, at least, was identical. Siaran was impressed by the speed with which they were able to suit up, clawed fingers deftly fastening catches in the armor to the leather pads underneath. Weapons were selected, checked, and loaded into various places on the broad utility belts, shoulder carriers, and gauntlets. Jackal extended his forearm blades a bare inch from Siaran's left eye and mimed swiping it across her face, then laughed as she jumped back.

Each predator had the shoulder cannon that seemed to be the last holdover in an emergency, but from that necessity their tastes varied widely. Siaran noticed that Jackal loaded his weapons cache for bear, choosing one of every weapon on the high wall, and two of some, until he could hold no more. By contrast, Rune chose only a set of wrist blades for each arm, a spear, and two throwing discs. She smiled grimly at the difference, and whispered, "Coward," at Jackal's back on the other side of the room, even though she felt like one herself as soon as the word was out.

Armed and armored, Rune turned to Siaran, who had been forgotten until this point, and beckoned her closer. She went to him, feeling diminished between the two warriors in all their gear. Jackal growled and hissed behind his faceplate but otherwise made no move, to her relief. He could have decapitated her as easily as falling off a log with all the hardware he was carrying.

Rune indicated the wall with a generous sweep of one arm, then turned expectantly to Siaran. She glanced at him uncertainly and he barked at her. "You want me to choose?"

A nod.

Unhesitating now, and thinking of the spear back in her quarters, Siaran reached for one of the short swords. It was an easy choice. She'd been offered no armor, which was probably for the best because none of it came close to fitting her. The strange mesh skinsuit might have some advanced elastics technology that allowed its fit to adjust to the wearer, but she doubted the armor could do the same. Half the weapons on the wall required some piece of armor to mount them, so they were out; the other half, such as the flying discs, she didn't know how to use. The short sword had been her weapon of choice after she'd earned her second degree black belt, and even though this one was different in shape than the curved blade she was used to, it was the most familiar.

Rune grunted at her choice, but it was impossible to tell whether he meant approval or censure. She hefted the sword, feeling its weight and perfect balance, and stepped back to swing it experimentally. It blended perfectly with the flexing of her wrist and Siaran made passes, fast then slow, aligning it to her arm. It was a superb weapon and would not take much time to get used to. She smiled and inclined her head to Rune, who considered her for a long moment in silence. Then he plucked a dagger with a serrated edge and a deep blood groove from the wall and handed that to her, haft first.

She was so surprised that she accepted it unthinkingly in the ritualistic gesture she'd learned from Tae Kwon Do. Setting the sword on the floor, she reached with her right hand for the dagger's pommel, left hand open and flat beneath the right elbow, body inclined in a half bow. It was an old display of trust: to offer and accept a weapon with both hands showing meant that neither party was hiding a blade somewhere, ready to strike when the other's guard was down.

The hunter considered Siaran's new posture, the submission and trust. He glanced sidelong at Jackal, who made a chuffing sound caught somewhere between disbelief and humor. Siaran looked up into Rune's metal faceplate, eyes questioning. Rune moved his shoulders in what looked suspiciously like a shrug and pushed the handle of the knife into Siaran's hand. "Thanks," she said, wondering what subtle social cue she'd stumbled over this time.

Rune answered her in her own voice. "Full of surprises, aren't you?" The tone was sarcastic, wary; one of the first things she'd ever said to him.

They didn't train all that long day. The rest of the hunter crew entered the armory three by three. The teams emerged resplendent in shining lobstertail metal, fairly bristling with weaponry. Siaran ducked into her room at one point and pulled the pants and heavy jacket of her _do bohk_ on over the skinsuit, tying her belt properly around the jacket.

She ate alone for the first time she could remember. Jackal and Rune had disappeared on some errand of their own, and though hungry Siaran could scarcely force the food down. The wire-taut atmosphere on the ship had her in thrall. After consuming a few bites, she wandered to the control room and stood watching as the copper sun grew slowly, steadily closer. Rune found her there and gave her a broad leather belt that fit snugly against her hips and held scabbards for both her dagger and her sword. The screw tightened another turn against her nerves. She hated waiting.

Eventually she returned to her room and tried to sleep, fully clothed, weapons laid out on the bed beside her. A klaxon woke her for a restless doze some time later, howling eerily through the ship. Siaran was instantly alert, her mouth dry and her belly faintly nauseous, as it she always felt in the bated-breath time of inaction before a big competition. When Rune and Jackal came along the corridor to fetch her, she was already waiting quietly in the hall, hiking boots feeling stiff and awkward after so many weeks in bare feet.

Going forward with them, Siaran saw that the screen was filled with the view of a planet, half obscured in umbra. The sunlit side was mostly pale with ice or cloud, with a thin band of green-flecked brown at the bulge of the equator. The light from the dim copper star tinted the white paleness to a faint rust-red, like the color of dried blood.

They had arrived.


	11. Planetfall

**Chapter 11 – Planetfall**

The ship pierced atmosphere in the northern polar region and traveled south and east in a steady diving arc. Siaran watched the descent from the control room viewport, nose all but pressed against the glass. Gradually, the blank white expanse of the polar cap below was broken up by the shards of a tall mountain range, piercing through clouds like broken teeth. If there was a sea at all in between, it was solidly frozen, locking the polar cap and the northern continent together in eternal winter. Siaran shivered inside her skinsuit, which went on monitoring and regulating her body temperature without regard for external conditions. Wearing it, she was more comfortable than she'd ever been aboard the ship, which had always been a little too warm for her taste.

The ship descended, and the snowy waste continued. They seemed to be following a chain of mountains that snaked its way south, not as high as that first northern range. A clear delineation was visible between the land that bordered the mountains to either side. To the west was a high barren plateau, broken up here and there by deep river channels. In some places, the snow was scoured away to bare gray rock by strong winds or some other ecological factor. On the eastern side of the mountains lay a desert. Its characteristics, gray-white tundra that gave way southward to brown dunes dotted with snow, were less distinct than those of the western plateau, leading Siaran to believe that the desert was lower in elevation.

Abruptly, the desert dropped away down a sheer cliff face that stretched eastward out of sight. Below this wall was more snow, then large patches of poisonous-looking reds and yellows. Maybe rock, maybe vegetation of some kind. This inhospitable region faded as the spine of mountains flattened into foothills crowned with snow. To the south now were rolling hills that smoothed to a broad brown plain, and crossing that plain from east to west, Siaran saw a strip of flattened earth that might have been a road.

The ship slowed noticeably, and a humming whine filled the control room as retros were fired, easing their descent from horizontal to vertical. Cloaked, the ship landed in a valley among the foothills where they nudged up against the mountains' flanks. Landing gear hissed and settled. The engines were cut, spinning down from a throb to a purr to silence that lasted a breath, heavy on Siaran's ears.

The hunters, who had all been waiting in the control room throughout the approach, burst into motion. Siaran could hear the rush of blood through her head as she followed Rune and Jackal through the corridors and into the loading bay, where the broad ramp was already descending. The air that blew in from outside was cold and dry, heavy with a strange smell that reminded her of stagnation and dust. But it was breathable, so she walked with the tall warriors down the ramp and stepped onto the cold soil of another world.

It was about noon. The copper star was a faint smudge almost directly overhead, tinting the sky a dusky ginger like the corners of ancient parchment. Even here near the equator, the sun shed little light and less warmth. The air in the valley was shockingly cold after so long on board the warm ship. It burned Siaran's nose and throat, so she breathed shallowly at first, giving her body time to adjust to the change. Her _do bohk_ was no protection against cold like this, not for long; it was well below freezing, probably not more than ten degrees. But she remained comfortable in her skinsuit with its built in thermal-regulating properties. She gave silent thanks for Rune's gift.

Nothing moved in the valley except them; nothing grew except a scabby gray-white lichenlike substance Siaran mistook at first for patches of frost. Noticing the scaly edges, she bent to examine it, careful not to touch. A rattle from Rune interrupted her; the warriors were moving out as a loose formation with tighter grouping among the four parties. Jogging to catch up, Siaran spared a glance back over her shoulder as she heard the ramp retract, but there was no sign of the cloaked ship save the rapidly dwindling interior view. She wondered briefly whether they'd be able to find it again, but decided her energies were better placed worrying about the immediate situation. Besides, it was the hunters' job to keep track of their ship, not hers. She would leave it to them.

Joining Rune, she matched his stride as they made their way up the pebbly slope that led south out of the valley, between two gray-brown desolate hills. From the top, looking out toward the plain below, it was hard to believe that anything could scratch out a living on this planet. Once, before its sun had begun to dim and die, this might have been a thriving world. The plain below was inside the equatorial zone, the brown-green swath Siaran had seen from space. She imagined it might have once been rich and fertile, with fields of lush grain and a bustle of traffic on the broad road down there—if it was truly a road. Now it was barren, lifeless, a waste land. Whatever green she'd seen must be further south.

Halfway down the steep gradient on the other side, they found what had definitely been a narrow road at one time. The track bisected the hill in switchbacks, zigzagging all the way down to the plain. It was littered with boulders and broad cracks from the movement of the hills through centuries, but it was still discernible and was easier going than heading straight downhill. They turned onto it.

The wind blew strongly from the west now that they were out of the valley's sheltering arms. Depending on what direction the path took, it was either coming straight at them or straight behind them, sometimes gusting so hard that an unwary step at the wrong time could mean a nasty fall. They came to a tall spire of black rock that cleaved the steep hill, broad as a skyscraper across the base and almost as high, pointing like an accusing finger at the washed-out sky. The path dropped straight along it on the eastward and lee side, and was steep enough that they paused at the top to gauge their descent. The hunters had the advantage of a crampon-like hold in their claw-toed foot armor, but Siaran set her booted feet sideways and half-ran, half-slid down the eroded trail, balancing momentum with resistance, until she reached the base of the rock.

She was first around the corner, and skidded to a halt and stared numbly at what she saw there. Even the warriors, coming down behind her, paused and cocked their heads.

The three figures standing with their backs set against the rock looked like statues of petrified wood. Humanoid in appearance, they had dark brown, almost barklike flesh, with a strangely melted look where mummification and the slow inevitability of time and gravity had drawn it away from the bones. But all in all, the bodies were remarkably well preserved. They were female, and looked as if they might have been old when they died: naked and stooped, wearing only black bags over their heads. Their hands were raised to their faces, palms outward, as if they had died shielding themselves from whatever had killed them; but there was no mark on them from a weapon.

A cold finger touched the base of Siaran's spine and traveled upward until her hair, pulled back in a single tight braid, seemed to be crawling off her scalp. It was impossible to tell whether these tree-bark women had died five years ago or five hundred; but they had died, which meant they had lived. And they looked human. Something very like humans had once lived on this planet.

Glad beyond measure that she couldn't see their faces, Siaran stepped hurriedly past the dead things, ignoring Rune's quizzical head tilt and Jackal's coughing growl. The party moved on toward the base of the hill, and behind them the tree-bark women stood silent and unmoving in their endless vigil, trapped in death to forever ward off the bitter cold and darkness that every year ate up more of the dying planet.

They reached the base of the hill without seeing anything else of note, and struck off across the undulating land toward the distant road Siaran had thought she'd seen from the air. The soil was stony and half-frozen, and the air tasted of staleness and an oddly sterile decay. There was no cover, but the eleven hunters walked without activating the invisibility shift on their gauntlet computers. There was nothing to hide from.

Thinking of those invisibility suits, and her own lack of one, Siaran marched up beside Rune and said his name. The big warrior looked down at her; an improvement, she thought, on ignoring her whenever she used that nickname. "I'm not sure what we're down here to hunt," she told him, gray-blue eyes steady on the fierce mesh visor in his faceplate. "But I hope you're not planning to use me as bait." Despite the wind, her voice sounded flat, and it carried. For a moment, she fancied the wind was savoring the first utterance of a living thing it had heard in centuries.

Slowly, Rune raised his head, looking off to the southeast. Siaran watched him, saw the long natty braids rise and fall with his motion, felt her own plait bounce between her shoulder blades in time as she matched his stride. Finally, in her own voice, Rune said, "Planning to kill." Before she could ask what that meant, he stretched out a gloved hand and brushed her on the forehead, against the acid-burn scar. "Together," he added, still playing back her voice.

As a reassurance, it would have to do.

The low hills slowly flattened out until they walked at last on the broad plain. The footing was easier here, and they picked up the pace, Siaran at an easy jog she could maintain all day, the armored warriors in a long, swinging walk. From time to time she flexed or blew on her fingers to warm them, but otherwise felt no discomfort inside the thermal skinsuit. When the dull copper smudge was a few hours past its zenith, obscured periodically by scudding gray clouds, they reached the road.

It was an old road, pitted by time, its bed sunk yards below the surface of the plain from untold centuries of wear. Empty now, it split the plain along the ecliptic and they set off along it now with the old sun sinking gradually behind them. At the edges of the road, Siaran was sure she could see traces of ruts made by laden carts. She studied them, imagining how they must have formed during a time when heavy traffic had forced smaller vehicles to the road shoulders, there to slog through mud during the rainy seasons. Now the ruts were frozen fossillike into stony ground that looked as if it hadn't felt the kiss of rain in decades.

The dying star crawled feebly toward the western horizon, casting the empty land into a strange brassy twilight. It had not even been bright at noon, and now, halfway to sunset, it seemed that night would be on them before the sun had fully disappeared in the west. A sense of depressed finality, of hopelessness, tugged at Siaran. If her own planet's yellow sun went this way, sometime billions of years in the future—dwindling into senility and decay instead of exploding in a glorious nova—this would be Earth's fate. This long dying, this shrinking of the viable surface area until everyone was forced out or starved out. And if the dominant beings on the planet had not achieved space-flight by that time, there would be no escape for them. Fragments of a long-forgotten poem drifted at the edges of her mind.

_This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper._

"Why are we here?" she whispered to the vast nothingness, and nothing answered. The wind blew, and she walked with armored warriors on soundless feet where she was convinced no sentient thing had walked for centuries.

The road continued without break, straight and true. Twilight grew in the east, and at sunset, with garish streaks of bronze and rust red reaching clawlike across the sky at their backs, a magnificent star cluster rose in the east. Three bright stars in an angled V, with smudges of smaller stars around them. In the unpolluted atmosphere of the dead world, with no lights from civilization to obscure the night sky, it took Siaran a few minutes to realize that she was looking at a nebula, at the vast bank of space-borne dust that hid the new stars from view. The cluster rose higher, illuminating the plain in cold white light, almost as bright as a moon.

Walking on her left, Rune growled, sounding displeased. Some of the other warriors did the same. Siaran thought she knew what the problem was. On this stony land, with no rock or brush for cover, the star cluster that glittered like a diamond necklace across the eastern sky made the region almost as bright as it had been during full daylight. It was impossible to come by a decent darkness, impossible to hide. The stars would make the hunt very difficult, although what they could possibly hunting escaped her; the only living thing they'd seen had been the scrubby lichen in the valley.

Where the sun's brassy dimness had obscured the horizon line, the star cluster now threw it into sharp relief. Siaran saw that the road seemed to be leading straight to a bulk of hill or tall rock some miles distant. The isolated mound grew slowly closer until she could see broken spires of stone and humps of rock or earth. As far as she could tell, the road didn't deviate around but led straight to the base. Maybe there was a cavern there, dug into the base of an ancient mountain that sat lonely on the plain.

But the spires, even broken, were too straight; the mounds too smooth and regular. Two miles out, Siaran realized she was looking at a city.

Ten minutes later, when huge pillars from which hung a vast broken gate became visible, the group stopped. And now, faintly against the wind, they could hear a sound like a million little bells chiming.

The sound was discordant and sad, as if the bells' clappers were broken and their bodies cracked. It rose and fell with the wind, and it put Siaran's teeth on edge. She felt horribly exposed in the middle of the road, and put up no argument when Rune's claws plucked her shoulder. She followed him and Jackal off the road bed and scrambled with them up the high bank on the south side. The other three groups did the same, one to the south with them, the other two to the north bank. Psychologically, at least, that was an improvement. Should the improbable happen and something come along the road, they'd be able to see it coming better from up here.

The other south-side group, led by a tall warrior who was nearly gaunt by the standards of his race, conversed in quiet growls and chatters with Jackal and Rune. It took them only seconds to decide their plan, and the other group fanned out to the south while Siaran's continued along the road bank. The cluster light was in her eyes, making it hard to see any details of the city as they approached. She began to share her companions' dislike of the bright stars, although on any normal night she'd have thought them beautiful.

They closed the distance to the city by half, and Siaran's belly tightened in anticipation and a kind of savage joy. She still didn't know what they were here to do, and perhaps because of that was even more keenly aware of her surroundings. The long training aboard ship had served her well; she felt alert and strong, more primal than she ever had in her life. Her body and skills were honed to maximum, and were hers to use to their limit. Not by nature a hunter, she nevertheless was caught in the mood of the hunt as she kept half her attention on Rune, waiting for his cue.

The broken music of the bells grew louder, at once harsh and sweet. Overhead, the stone pillars rose to an impressive height, much taller than they'd looked out on the plain. One of the gates was missing, but the other still hung crookedly from a single massive valve. It was made of dense wood banded in metal and looked designed to withstand a siege. Whatever had blasted it must have been powerful indeed; the wood was two feet thick and perhaps ten wide by thirty tall.

Rune and Jackal paused in the shelter of the gate, and Siaran slid in beside them. Jackal hissed softly at her, but as she made no noise and held absolutely still, he could find no fault. She could hear nothing except the bells, and wished they would stop even for a minute. Their eerie chiming covered any sound of movement besides their own that they might otherwise hear.

Jackal occasionally chattered softly to himself, but Rune was silent as the two warriors peered around the gate into the city proper. Siaran saw the starlight catch the beads in their hair as the long locks swung. A long moment passed, then Rune turned and beckoned to her: their old "come get some" gesture from the sparring floor. Siaran managed a faint grin and stepped around the gate. Now she could see a broad courtyard paved in broken stone, with a vast shallow basin in the center that might have once held a fountain but now held only dust. The courtyard sloped upward; she could see now that the city was built on a rise, which was why they'd seen it from so great a distance.

To right and left from the vast central place, the paving led to narrower avenues between the remains of stone buildings. These causeways were soon lost in distance and darkness, but Siaran looked at each one warily. Anything could come out of there. At the far end of the courtyard, a platform jutted out like a ship's prow. It looked made of smooth white marble, glittering coldly in the cluster light, and its edges were smoothed and worn by the scouring wind. Crowds might have gathered here to listen to important announcements from that platform. Perhaps it had been used for edifying entertainments like public executions.

At the platform's far end, butting up against the hill, were columns, some still intact, that must have once supported a frieze or ornate roof. That had fallen and shattered and now lay in tumbled heaps, marble boulders strewn about the platform. A single covered stair wound up the hill beyond the columns, leading to the broken spires high up in the city.

Nothing moved. On silent feet, with Jackal leading, Siaran next, and Rune bringing up the rear, the group stepped past the towering, sentrylike gatepost and entered the city. There was no sign of any of the other groups, nor of any other life at all.


	12. City of Bells

**Chapter 12 – City of Bells**

Keeping close to the edge of the courtyard, Jackal led them into the maze of streets and stone structures on the right. Here, too, the ground sloped gently up. It seemed as if all roads led inevitably to the broken towers at the summit. Jackal chose a path that wound away from the hill. The gaps between the paving stones held a rime of frost. The buildings rose to crumbling heights and crowded close on either side of the narrow causeway. Doors were torn or rotted away so that the empty entrances gaped like hungry mouths, silent, unknown, menacing.

Siaran all but trod on Jackal's heels. Her feet and breathing obeyed their training and went along with very little sound, but her heart was shaking her ribcage and pounding in her head like a drum, outpacing the arrhythmia of the bells. The actual hunt, through the haunting deadness of this strange world, was nothing like creeping through the corridors on the ship. The unknown factor was too great. Her rational mind told her that she and the eleven hunters had to be the only sentient things here. But the primitive ape in her, fearing what it did not know, kept its options open and its senses alert.

The city walls shut out most of the light from the brilliant star cluster. The clouds began to thicken, turning what light there was diffuse and gray. A few whirling flakes of snow began to fall. The wind continued to blow, sometimes hard, sometimes harder.

They came to a bridge.

It was an ancient arch of stone that might have once been graceful. High and narrow, it spanned a wide basin, possibly artificial, that descended, tier upon tier, into darkness. Across the span were more buildings, larger, with steep layered roofs. The street they'd been following ended at the foot of the bridge. The paving stones outlined a second path, worn and uneven, that spiraled down into the stepped basin.

There was no telling what might lurk down there in the blackness. But up on the bridge, they'd be visible, exposed, and defenseless against anything that happened to look up.

"Damned if you do, damned if you don't," Siaran muttered. Either choice was almost equally undesirable.

Jackal rounded on her with a throaty snarl. She could picture his upper mandibles curling in displeasure, as so often happened when he looked at her. She made a face at him, but kept quiet. Behind her, Rune gave a sibilant, clacking hiss, barely audible over the bells. Jackal dropped his chin to his chest in a nod, turned, and without hesitation led them down into the pit.

Siaran, forcing her nerveless feet to follow, decided she would rather have taken the bridge. At least from up there she'd be able to see. Whatever spectrum of light the warriors' masks used to allow them to see in all conditions did her own vision no good.

There was, at least, some respite from the wind by the time they'd descended to the third level. Each tier had a gently curving edge bound by a crumbling stone wall that dropped a few yards to the next level. The path wound so cunningly that they soon abandoned it and instead made their way straight across curiously stubbly earth to the next section of wall, dropped down, and headed for the next. The sound of bells receded further with each level they descended. Siaran realized in the quiet that she could hear her own breathing, and hastily shut her mouth to silence it.

The stubble underfoot became stalks, tough and resistant. They crunched when trod on, but were still yielding underfoot. Siaran could not see the stuff clearly and wondered whether it might be actual living vegetation; a more complex relative of the valley lichen, perhaps. The next tier down, it grew as high as her knees, and she and the two hunters pushed through rows of fronds.

Regular rows. Like planted crops. The first star in the cluster had risen above the city wall high above. There was a momentary break in the building cloud cover, and by the star's faint silver light Siaran could see the gleaming edges of pale long leaves that tapered from the central stalk of each plant. The leaves swayed and rustled as they pushed through them, and she could feel with her feet that the stalks were planted in orderly rows.

No plant naturally grew in orderly rows. Siaran froze with that realization, one stride away from walking into Jackal, who had also stopped. She saw the swing of his long hair as he raised his head, almost as if scenting the air.

Not scenting. Listening.

Rising up from the darkness below came a sound as improbable as it was distinct.

Music.

It was thin and reedy, rising and falling like wind, sometimes overlain by the distant music of the bells high above. It lilted in a strange wild melody that followed no rhythm but its own. Pan pipes, it sounded like, but even so Siaran had never heard anything like it.

Jackal hiss-clicked a warning and Siaran, turning to Rune, saw the brief lightning shimmer as he and Jackal activated the invisibility shift on their suits.

Fright and anger at this abandonment rose in her like a wall, blocking rational thought for a few breathless moments. Ruthlessly, she pushed it down. Now, of all times, she couldn't lose her head. She heard movement, a faint rustling in the plant stalks, but in the dead air and mostly bereft of her primary sense, she couldn't tell if it came from the invisible hunters beside her or somewhere up ahead. She dropped into a low crouch and pressed the catch on the spear haft; the business ends extended with a tiny _snick_. The leaves of the strange plants brushed against her face. They were fuzzed and velvety, like a tarantula's legs, and their edges and tips were sharp as razors. Without knowing what they were, she hated them.

Without warning, hard smooth fingers closed around her left arm. Siaran gasped at the unexpected contact, but was grateful for it all the same. She didn't even mind the sharp claws pricking her flesh. Led by the invisible hunter, gripping the elongated spear in her right hand, she picked her way through the hateful growing things and back into the shadow of the wall above. They didn't hurry and took care to be silent. Siaran pressed close to her guide, relieved that Rune and Jackal hadn't left her behind and determined to do nothing to cause that to happen.

They found the lip of the next wall and went over it. Here, no more of the strange crops grew. The ground was spongy, and from it came a cold, damp smell; the first sign of moisture they had yet encountered. Siaran had lost track of the descent, but guessed they might now be at the bottom of the basin. The ground was uneven here, broken up by hillocks and huge shattered slabs of stone half-sunk into the soil. The music was stronger. There was also light, faint and flickering, sometimes dying out altogether before resurging. It was enough that Siaran could see the dark bulks of stone looming up as the warriors moved from one to the other, using them as cover. How thoughtful, she thought, mindful of the fact of her visibility. She felt the tension wind up yet another notch in her belly.

Then they all stopped. The fingers relaxed their grip, and Siaran leaned her shoulder against the cold stone to her right. It felt smooth and uniform, as if it had been shaped by tools. Maybe it was the remains of a shattered structure—a temple of some kind. It didn't seem right that something so ordinary as houses could have been built in this strange place, far below the city streets.

Her escort—probably Rune—moved his hand from her arm to the middle of her back, and pushed gently. Siaran crept forward and peered around the corner of the rock, blinking back the sudden brilliance of the fire that was the source of the light.

It was a small fire, lit in a hollow that was hardly more than a dimple in the earth between half a dozen partially upright stone slabs, one of which was the trio's hiding place. It burned brightly, a crackle of yellow-orange, and seemed indecently cheerful in that eerie place.

She also saw the source of the music.

Lithe figures leapt and whirled around the fire, some alone, some clasping long-fingered hands at the end of knotted grass-stem arms. They wore tatters that flapped and spun with the wild gyrations of their dance. They were as skinny as rakes and as light-footed as deer, and they had two legs, two arms, and a head that seemed disproportionately large for the thin bodies. One of them kept apart from the rest, playing a set of multiple pipes, occasionally leaping and twirling, skipping in the opposite direction of the dancers' widdershins circle.

Cold metal pressed against her cheek; she turned her head, and felt the contours of a faceplate and the brush of thick braids. Under cover of the piping, Rune said, softly, in her own voice, "Let's do this." There was a chuckling rattle from beyond him. She was so stunned by the sudden appearance of humanoid life here, deep in the dead city, that Siaran was too slow to react when taloned fingers jabbed at her lower back, shoving her out from behind the cover of stone. She stumbled, recovered, and swore.

The music stopped. The dancing figures came to rest, their tatters fluttering to stillness. The instrument dropped forgotten from the piper's fingers. As one, they turned to regard the stranger in their midst. Their eyes caught the light of the fire, and even from twenty yards away, Siaran could see that there was something odd about those eyes.

Every instinct screamed at her to get back behind the rock, but she couldn't do it. Her stupid human loyalty kept her from revealing that she wasn't alone. She couldn't be sure what Rune and Jackal were planning, and besides, she'd been seen now. Trying to hide again was pointless.

However, it appeared as if she'd been set out as bait after all. Had she failed to measure up to some standard? All that preparation—the training, the gift of the skinsuit, the choice of weapons—had been for nothing. If she wasn't so scared, she'd be furious.

Siaran thought she heard movement behind her but couldn't be sure. Her attention was riveted to the group at the fire, who were now approaching, stepping lightly and carefully like hunting cats. Their hands were empty, and she could see now that they wore the skins of many small animals sewn together, and that the tatters were the legs and tails dangling free. On their heads were little caps, also made from animal skins. At the peak of each cap was the intact head of the skin's former owner: little foxlike ears and snouts, mouths half-open and snarling even in death.

The ragged band was human in appearance; elfin and fey, with wide cheekbones and pointed chins. Their mouths were wide and thin, with almost nonexistent lips. They came closer, not quite spreading out to flank her, but not clustered in a group. There were perhaps twenty of them, and they watched her with eyes that were enormous and slanted upward at the outer corners. Their eyes had no pupils, just irises in jewel shades of green and blue and yellow, each faintly luminous. They were a short people, standing no taller than Siaran's shoulders, and they looked capable of incredible speed.

One of them—Siaran thought it might be female—hissed and said something in a lilting voice not unlike the music of the pipes. Siaran hadn't moved except to grasp her staff in both hands, and the group was now just a few strides from her.

She realized that she was probably failing miserably as a hunter. She was woefully out of her depth. But she could not bring herself to attack these frail beings who, unarmed, were approaching her with what might be curiosity. They stopped, speaking to each other or maybe to her. Paralyzed by uncertainty, Siaran couldn't make herself reply.

The girl-thing came up close to her, showing no fear. She touched the sleek black haft of Siaran's staff, then reached up and pressed her thin fingers to Siaran's face. The fingers were cold as ice. She said something over her shoulder to the others, then she looked back at the tall human woman and laughed. Her teeth were sharp, shocking in that elfin mouth, the canines long and curved. Her eyes were green as jade and held an alien depth that drew the gaze endlessly down. Siaran looked into them and forgot where she was. She felt her head droop, suddenly too heavy for her neck. She waited patiently, stupid as a meat animal submitting to slaughter, mutton for the spit.

The creature's fingers moved so fast that Siaran almost didn't see them. From her bodice, she drew a set of iron claws on over her fingers, raised them, and slashed Siaran across the cheek. She raised the claws and licked the little bead of red blood from them, then smiled again, the feral smile of a carnivore.

The shock of pain and the feel of her blood welling into the cold damp air brought Siaran around a little. She recoiled, missing by a hairsbreadth the second unbelievably fast stroke. That one had been designed to tear her throat out.

All the fey creatures had their claws out now, and all rushed forward to surround her. Training and pure survival instinct came to Siaran's aid and shook off the strange hypnosis. She focused on the girl-thing in front of her, who voiced a wordless cry of hunger and fury and jumped at her. Siaran gave back one step, brought up the spear, and drove it through the spindly ribcage and out through the spine with a wet snapping sound.

Bewildered and angry, she used the spear like a staff, clubbing left and right to keep her attackers off her. They screamed like banshees, and light and frail though they might be, it couldn't be long before Siaran was overwhelmed by sheer force of numbers. She whirled the spear through a rapid figure-eight, used its bladed end to slice open the stomach of one of the elf-things that got too close. The brutal satisfaction she got from that frightened her a little but that seemed unimportant given the immediacy of the situation.

One of the males jumped for her, making it through the deadly whirl of her spear and latching onto her upper body. The iron talons bit into her shoulder; Siaran dropped the staff and grabbed him around the neck, which was skinny as a bird's, and ripped him off her. It took all her strength to hold him at arm's length, and it wasn't enough to keep out of reach of the talons, which pierced her pectoral muscle to the right of her sternum. She squeezed his neck, teeth clenched against the pain, and drew her arm back to hurl her attacker away.

He arched in silent agony as twin blades of jointed metal, strangely transparent except for the dark blood that dripped off them, sprouted from his thin chest. Another of the things leaped at her from the left, only to be tossed aside midair. The dying male she'd been holding was ripped out of her grasp and flung to the ground.

Her would-be killers paused. Blue-white lightning arced from the ground to nearly eight feet up as the two predators revealed themselves, one to either side of Siaran, Rune with his wrist-blades dripping blood. He roared, and Jackal roared, a primal challenge that rang through the deep enclosed space and rose to spiral up through the city.

Siaran's assailants turned and ran. So did Rune. So did Jackal. So did Siaran, after picking up her spear.

Jackal fired his net-gun at one of them and brought it screaming to the ground. The net tightened, slicing into flesh; Jackal strode casually up and watched the creature writhe in agony for a moment before he drove his spear through the skull. Rune ran past him and Siaran gave chase alongside Rune, not sure whether her sudden desire for vengeance was due to the strange humanoids who had tried to kill her, or the hunters who had thrust her into the situation while they took a more stealthy approach.

Whatever it was, she allowed it to drive her, using it to block out the things she did as she and Rune, with Jackal somewhere behind them, hunted the swift elfin beings through the ruins and killed them. They were fast and they were cunning, but even Siaran was more than a match for them one on one. Cornered, they would always fight with flashing claws and inhuman screaming rage. That made her feel better about dispatching them, which she did as swiftly as she could. Rune killed with even greater efficiency, the same way he'd done in the Gobi back on Earth. But Jackal was a sadist, preferring to administer the final stroke only after his prey was terrified and in pain. After the first incident with the net, Siaran averted her eyes from his methods.

Three of their quarry, fleet as antelope, dodged into a tunnel overhung with dank vines. Siaran plunged after them without hesitation. Rune paused, peering inside the narrow entrance, then barked for Jackal. Then he too went into the tunnel, ducking his head to prevent it hitting the arched stone ceiling.

Siaran's feet slipped on slimy rock, forcing her to slow down. The floor pitched up after just a few yards, steeply enough to slow her further. Water dripped from overhead, and the place had a rank smell of rotting vegetation. She could see nothing, but continued to run anyway, fingertips brushing the walls to each side. She took care to lift her knees as she ran to avoid tripping on any uneven stone. Somewhere ahead was her quarry, getting further away with every second. They trilled as they ran, cries of fear that echoed back to her, and she pursued with murderous intent.

She spent minutes in the tunnel, climbing as fast as she dared, then abruptly burst out of the close, fetid dampness. The tunnel had led her back up to street level. Siaran paused, looking around to get her bearings. It was snowing in earnest now, and she had to blink away the wind-driven flakes. It looked as if she was on the long causeway they'd seen from the courtyard, the one that led up to the towers at the crest of the hill. The sound of bells was all around, amplified by the snow that already dusted the worn paving stones. The causeway was flanked left and right by broken columns. To each side, a natural ridge dropped steeply to a more gentle slope and below that, the courtyard and the roofs of buildings further in. Here and there a piece of roof still held that must have once sheltered city officials or high priests from the weather as they proceeded down the walkway to the public platform. Leading off to one of those columns, just visible in the snow, were a few sets of light footprints.

Siaran smiled unpleasantly. Rune came out of the tunnel behind her, and Jackal behind him. They were silent. Siaran glanced at Rune, pointed at the prints in the snow, then pointed at the broken columns. Rune nodded and took a step forward.

Three lithe shadows with gleaming feral eyes launched themselves from behind the cover of jagged stone. Rune's spear took the first one through the throat; the second one he caught by the neck, snapping the body as he would snap a whip, then tossing it aside like a cut puppet. Siaran moved forward to help and was knocked to her knees as Jackal rushed past her to impale the third on his curved wrist blades.

So the entire tribe of feral carnivores met its end, as miserably as it had lived. Siaran walked over to one of the still-upright columns and leaned against it, glad she could feel the shock of cold marble through the skinsuit. She was trembling from the aftereffects of adrenaline and trying not to show it. She also felt faintly queasy and did her best to ignore the broken bodies that lay silent on snow and stone. She was, in the basic sense, happy to be alive. But she did not relish the feeling that came with killing so many things that looked so human. Jackal and Rune, on the other hand, tossed their heads and pounded their chests with closed fists, glorying in the victory. Rune's display was silent; Jackal's was full of triumphant roaring and bellowing.

The last echoes of the hunter's voice died away, and for a moment, even the discord of the bells seemed to fall silent. Snow continued to fall, and the light was the same dim, uniform gray as a midnight snowfall on Earth. The similarity disturbed her even more.

Jackal gave a satisfied grunt and thumped his chest one last time. Siaran glared at him from her column, disliking him in that instant as much as he seemed to dislike her. "Don't you think that's a little much? They were tiny. Like birds. Not exactly a challenge for a brute like you."

Jackal crossed the narrow stone path with a pantherish tread, and in spite of her resolve Siaran edged away until she stood a step from empty air and a steep drop to the courtyard, regretting her irritated words. The big hunter stopped just when another stride would have rammed her off the edge, and stood glaring down at her from behind his ornate faceplate. Insolently, he ran his fingers roughly across the blood that oozed from her chest wound, then her shoulder, then her cheek. It hurt. Jackal rubbed his fingers together as if testing the texture of her blood. Then he rumbled in his throat, low and menacing. He shoved her wounded shoulder, hard, with his open hand, then did it again as Siaran stared at him.

Rune growled; Jackal growled louder. Siaran knew what the gesture meant; she'd seen Jackal and Rune use it on each other before their rougher sparring matches. It was a challenge. She didn't doubt that he'd picked her injured shoulder deliberately, inflicting the most hurt he could. She looked at him, huge and powerful with his armor gleaming dully in the diffuse light. There was tension and anger in every line of his body. Siaran suspected that she was right, that for Jackal, the hunt had been unspectacular and far too easy. He'd played up the victory for reasons of his own, but ultimately he wanted more. And Siaran's attitude gave him what he wanted.

She didn't want to fight him. Not here, on this strange lonely world; not now, with the memory of slaughter still fresh, and the smell of alien blood so like her own filling her mind with doubt and her belly with nausea. More violence, more deaths—possibly her own—was the last thing she needed or wanted. What she wanted was to crawl away somewhere warm and safe, to cry and rage and scream against the monstrosity of what she had done. Whether in self-defense or not, she had taken lives much more fragile than her own.

There was no such luxury for her anymore, if indeed there ever had been. There was only the old city and the ten-foot-wide causeway; Rune standing to one side, silent and intent; and Jackal filling her world with threat, mercilessly driving her civilized nature out by demanding she make the oldest and most basic survival choice of all: kill or be killed. There was no doubt in Siaran's mind that he would kill her if she refused. He was too frustrated, too hungry for blood for it to be any other way. He would probably kill her anyway; he was more than capable of it.

Suddenly, she hated him, hated the inevitability and timing of his challenge. All the long weeks on the ship, coping with his torments without cracking, refusing to show weakness or self-pity, came to a churning head. She thought about being used as bait. She remembered the half-drowning hopeless feeling she'd had looking into the girl-creature's strange eyes, how she'd been entranced into passivity even in the face of death. She had known then, and remembered now, what it felt like to be a cow in a slaughterhouse, watching the hammer rise and fall.

It was not for her. She might lack the savagery and single-minded purpose needed to be a true hunter, but neither did she possess the bovine acceptance that would allow her to die without fighting.

"All right, goddammit." She stepped around him, into the middle of the narrow stone road, and raised her bloody spear. "Whatever happens, Jackal, you will never to touch me again. I don't care if it's the last thing I do." She was beyond caring if he understood her. There was nothing in her now but the terrible relentless patience of a gladiator, condemned to die but determined to take her adversary with her.

Jackal nodded once. Without warning or fanfare, he began, pulling out a flying disc with effortless speed. He shook out its blades and sent the deadly thing spinning in an arc at Siaran's head. She dropped to one knee and felt it zoom past, then rolled to the side to avoid its return pass, coming up against a jagged edge of fallen rock. She couldn't afford to waste any time with taunts or fancy moves. Jackal was in earnest, and she knew, with the same primal knowing she'd experienced with Rune, that she would have to kill him if she could. Crouching against the rock, she aimed her spear at the juncture of Jackal's ribcage where the soft nerve center lay, unprotected by armor. His first attack unsuccessful, the hunter stretched out his hand to catch the disc.

In that eye-blink instant, all of Jackal's attention was focused solely on getting his weapon back, leaving no option of attack or defense. Siaran threw the spear as hard as she could.


	13. Cry Havoc

**Chapter 13 – Cry Havoc**

The warrior Siaran called Rune (he knew the word's meaning but had not bothered to teach her his true name) belonged to a race of beings whose history was so long that for them, interstellar flight had been old when Ur of the Chaldees was a raw young village. Their tribal customs, dating back to their own time as primitives, were old beyond any Earth conception of the word. His people had no need for law. Their culture had endured and adapted for such an unimaginably long time that through the millennia, a code of honor had evolved and solidified into custom more unbreakable than any law.

One such custom dictated that when a challenge was handed down from one member of a tribe to another, and that challenge was accepted, no one would interfere. To do so would mean dishonor or death for the interloper. In truth, though, it wasn't a matter of fear or consequence that prevented interruption of a combat challenge. It wasn't done. It never had been done, not since Rune's people had fought and fed and died in the dawn of their existence under the fierce young sun of their home world.

In obedience to that custom, Rune moved further up the broken causeway to give Siaran and Jackal room. He turned so that the cold wind and snow blew at his back, and stood, outwardly impassive, looking down the walkway at the combatants.

It was harder to watch than he'd expected.

The way the young human accepted the challenge stirred something in him that was akin to pride; the dangerous sort of pride that the elders warned against, that interrupted the balance of self with environment and made for poor judgment. Its existence gnawed at him. What had begun as respect and admiration, not in themselves a problem, had become something that was. When Rune had marked Siaran with his clan's sigil, it had been because she had fought with cunning and with honor. That combination was rare enough that he had given her both the token and the opportunity to accompany his people on the hunt.

She had claimed that opportunity. He admired her for it. Not every human could endure the warrior-clan combat training, particularly females, who were physically weaker and more easily manipulated. But Siaran was big for her sex and strong, and more importantly, she enjoyed the fighting and learned quickly to master new techniques. She was an exception to her race and certainly nothing like the females of his own, who eschewed fighting in all forms and would never travel with a hunting party except in the direst need. Siaran thought like a warrior and moved like a ripple of wind on water, and was a lot tougher than her snappable-looking limbs suggested.

Rune had learned to read the expressions on her smooth little face, and it fascinated him to watch her transcend fear and uncertainty and emerge determined and unshakably whole, no matter what happened to her. She reminded him of himself as an unblooded youngster, angry because he was not yet the full warrior he yearned to be, determined to make up for his lack by training twice as hard and fighting twice as fiercely. He understood Siaran, as well as it was possible for one of his kind to understand one of hers.

Jackal (Rune knew the meaning of that word too, and it caused him great private amusement) did not understand. Jackal would never understand. He was a veteran of a great many battles and had completed many solo hunts, and humans were only and ever meat to him. Exceptional fighters of any race save his own had only one place in Jackal's mind: the trophy shelf. To him, Siaran was little more than a pet, trained to fight and nurtured to loyalty.

She was not, and would never be, a replacement for the blood brother he'd lost to the hard meats in the Earth desert, fighting alongside Rune. He did not blame Rune for that; such things were not in the warriors' nature. But he could hate the human for living when his brother had not, and for returning in his place, and he did that extremely well. Jackal hated her for everything she was: alien, female, soft, resilient, resourceful, and brave. It didn't matter to him that many of those traits were positive things.

The battle training time aboard the ship had not been easy for Rune. Jackal knew the mechanics of a hunting party and could hardly refuse to include the human if she passed muster, but always, Rune knew, he tested her, hoping to expose a flaw that would render her unacceptable as a fellow hunter. To his fury, the alien female never gave him the opening he hoped for. She was watchful and distrusting of Jackal, and she didn't understand their talk.

It fell to Rune to create a viable hunting party out of that seething mess. He'd done his best.

But now Jackal had taken offense at her insult—he understood her inefficient language almost as well as Rune did and ignored nearly all of it as inane chatter—and before Rune could stop her, Siaran had accepted.

When Jackal had challenged her, Rune watched resignation replace weariness and desperation as she grasped the idea. Then her face grew hard and grim, and Rune saw there only the iron resolve of one who believes herself doomed but will never be beaten.

It disturbed him, and he hesitated before moving the proper distance away.

It took him a moment to smooth the knot of conflict in his belly into the perfect, emotionless state of awareness that was the core of survival. Still, in that moment, Rune had for the first time in all his long life visualized another creature's death and thought it wasteful.

She dodged the first attack, the _chakt-ra_ designed to sever her head at the neck. She rolled, a compact ball, then unfolded those mantis limbs and set herself to watchful stillness, crouching on the ground with her body arched like a bow. The warrior attacked fast and accurately but was toying with her all the same. Rune knew what he was doing and could not condemn him for it, even if it was not his own way. Jackal wanted to make her forget her commitment to his death in pain and terror. He wanted to be everything in Siaran's world when he killed her, and he wanted that world to be filled with the realization that against him, she was unworthy, nothing, a bug to be squashed and forgotten.

That moment was not upon her yet. With the awful concentration of which Rune had seen her capable, Siaran waited until Jackal's movements left him briefly vulnerable. As she cocked her spear, the wind blew a sudden gust down the narrow terrace from the towers above. It brought with it smell that was not the unrelenting dying-planet smell of stone and dry dust.

It smelled of warrior musk and blood.

Rune turned his head to the wind and spread his mandibles. Beneath his faceplate, the sensitive olfactory glands in nostril and cheek tasted and analyzed this familiar and foreboding smell, and the overlying scent that came with it that was entirely new: cold-furred hungry animal reek, hot jaws eager to kill.

Siaran threw the spear as the baying started. She and Jackal were oblivious to everything except each other.

Rune smelled death on the wind, heard death coming on fell voices and furred paws, and broke an unbreakable commandment.

His leap carried him between and beyond the combatants. The spear struck him at the juncture of underarm and shoulder and the barbed head buried itself deep in the muscle, just below the armor. Rune spun with the impact and awkwardly kicked the _chakt-ra_ out of Jackal's grasp before he crashed to the walkway and slid heavily against the remains of a column.

The brittle stonework cracked, causing a small avalanche of dust and pebbles. The spear-point was cold fire in his shoulder and he grasped the haft with a snarl and yanked it out. Chunks of flesh tore away as the barbs caught, but Rune ignored that and the bright blood that came welling after. He rolled, shaking off the fine layer of grit, and flexed the fingers of his injured arm to ensure that everything was still in working order.

He looked back up the causeway, knowing he had to hurry. Siaran was staring at him, her body still arched in the attitude of throwing the spear, her face a white smear of uncomprehending shock. Jackal was advancing on him, his rattle low and furious, his shoulders hunched and talons spread as if he would kill Rune himself for what he'd done.

Rune ignored them both and gathered himself to spring. He scanned through natural, heat, and magnetic vision. Through the darkness and whirling snow, he saw great white four-legged shapes bounding along the causeway, beast-eyes glowing, white fangs glinting. They thought _kill _and _good play_ and _hungry_, and while Rune did not understand their beast-language, he could sense the weight and intent of their minds. That was curious. The _kainde amedha_, the hard meats, used hive-mind-speak to communicate with each other, but these furred monsters could share their thoughts with outsiders, and Rune heard them.

They stopped in the shadows of an intact slab of roof, jostling together, their eyes hell-bright and their breath white on the gray air, mixing with the snow. Their heads were ugly and long-snouted, and looked too heavy for even the thick neck to support. The muzzles lifted, exposing double rows of knife-teeth. The biggest of them came forward, stiff-legged and growling. The ridge of his spine reached as tall as Siaran's head. The red jaws smiled, and the eyes grew brighter. Hell-hound eyes. Behind him, the pack circled restlessly, silent in the blowing snow but never still, making it hard to count their numbers.

Siaran made a choking sound and crumpled to the cold stone. The king-dog sauntered toward her but she did not rise to fight; she only whimpered and scrabbled at the paving.

There was coldness in the air, and it bit deeply even through Rune's thermal webbing. The warrior depressed the catch on the inside of his right gauntlet and the wrist-blades snapped out, fully extended. He sprang at the leader.

Terror met him, a knife in his mind that cleaved down his spine and shredded his will, turning muscle first to water and then to ice. He fell beside Siaran and only instinct made him curl to protect his belly. He was terrified beyond sense, a silent scream in his mind. Above him, Jackal looked down in an attitude of puzzlement before he, too, was stricken with palsy and sank to all fours, breathing harshly inside his faceplate.

Rune was aware of the great pounding of his heart and the icy dread that swept in terrible rhythm through his veins. He struggled on the stones as the king-dog came up to him and nosed him almost playfully, rolling him over with a nudge of its great head and snapping at the dragging tendrils of his hair. It was having fun.

He could not remember fear like this, not even as a youngling on his first hunt when a rock-lizard had caught him unawares and opened its jaws to take him. It had not taken him, and even though he had been afraid, he could still see and act. Now he was blind, staring, hearing somewhere the sound of gasping sobs, his mind a confused dark whirl of panic.

The pack was all around now. The king-dog reached out a leg like a tree-trunk and unsheathed tiger claws. It dug a leisurely furrow into the stone of the causeway, then reached out and snagged Siaran, dragging her toward hungry jaws. Blood came out of rents left in the thermal mesh by those claws, but she did not react.

Jackal lashed out blindly as one of the coarse-furred beasts prowled close to him. The hound-thing caught his arm between its teeth and began to shake it with powerful twists of its great head.

Rune saw flashes of it all as he struggled to breathe, to live, and he knew that the hounds would play with them until they bled and died, as they had done with one of the other hunter teams somewhere up the hill, among the towers.

He had never been the one hunted before. All his weaponry and training were made useless by fear, that most ancient dread that sucked the mind dry and left the body a vulnerable husk.

The king-dog let go of Siaran and dragged a sandpaper tongue along the gashes its claws had made, tasting her blood, licking it from the white muzzle.

A hound loomed above him, coarse-furred and white in the snowy gloom. Its eyes glowed bright, unwavering, filling his mind with paralyzing fear. It opened its jaws to bite.

Always, he had been the hunter. It was everything he knew. His people had held long to the old ways and despite all their technology they were not so different from their ancient ancestors. They still lived for the glory of the hunt and the primitive thrill it brought. That connection with the primal center of his being stirred in Rune at that pivotal moment. Stripped of all the deep layers of stoic pride, it was intimately familiar with fear. All life was fear. Without fear to teach wariness and patience and strength, it was much too easy to die.

The warrior Siaran called Rune belonged to an old race that had mastered fear and indelibly stamped that mastery on every fiber of their being, but had never truly forgotten it. Deep within that primal center, Rune remembered.

He was _yautja_. He did not die.

He killed.

Rune, clumsy and vicious with his psyche caught between dark terror and the assertion of his core identity, drove his wrist-blades through the hound's neck. It screamed and choked, and he felt a lessening of the fear as the beast staggered, trying to snap at the bright steel embedded in its throat.

He knew then that the mind-weight was how the beasts killed. With fear, a concentrated sending of it to render their prey inert and helpless. There was nothing to make him afraid except what was in their minds. Wariness of their fangs and sharp claws came as second nature.

Rune growled; a sonorous ticking rattle full of menace. He tottered to his knees, then his feet, muscles still not fully under his control. He looked down at the hound, still skewered on his wrist. The terrible light in its eyes glinted briefly in the eye coverings on Rune's faceplate. Then the light faded, the massive head dropped, and he was holding only dead weight. He flung the body away.

Barking an order to Jackal, using the imperative command form, Rune bounded over to his fellow warrior. Jackal was hissing, trying to pry the hound's teeth from his arm with fingers too numb with fear to make it possible. But he was trying, and he heard Rune and raised his head.

Rune caught the hound on the side of the head with a studded-knuckle fist. It let go of Jackal and twisted to face him, snarling. Wild sendings of terror battered him as the animal shook its head to clear away the daze of the blow. Rune let the fear slide over him. Knowing its origin made it easier to fight.

There was no time to explain to Jackal, and in any case they were all so used to nonverbal, basic communication during a hunt that Rune didn't even consider that option. He would have to fight for both of them until Jackal figured it out on his own.

Rune brought forth his spear. The hound, realizing that fear was not working, leaped at him before he could extend the weapon. Although he readied himself for the impact, he never felt it. Jackal met it and grappled with it, oblivious to the sharp tossing fangs and the raking claws. The hound screamed in rage and whipped its big body as he hugged it around the middle. Jackal staggered to the edge of the path and with a grunt launched the screaming beast over the side.

Life and movement began once more to circulate through Rune's muscles, now that the satisfaction of the hunt warmed him, replacing the icy paralysis. Though still outnumbered, he and Jackal could shake off the telepathic fear that seemed to be the hounds' greatest weapon. That brought the odds down greatly, and besides, somewhere up in the silent black towers were dead tribesmen to avenge.

The king-dog still had Siaran. She lay limp on the stones and Rune couldn't tell from the distance whether she still lived. If she did, she deserved the same respite he had given Jackal. Whether she could shake off the fear and return to the fight was up to her.

The king-dog's attention had been diverted from its prey by the deaths of two of its pack. It swung the huge head toward Rune and glared balefully out of yellow eyes. He tensed, waiting for the bolt of fear. It hit him, stronger than the others, but he ran forward anyway with a roar, building momentum. The whip of terror weakened his resolve, but Rune was going so fast by then that it didn't matter. He slammed into the huge beast, at least his equal in weight and strength, turning his shoulder at the last instant to catch the breastbone and drive the hound back on its hind legs.

Big bodies smashed to the icy stone, grappled on the narrow treacherous pathway. The white hound was strong and fast. It bared the double row of fangs and snapped, the jaws powerful enough to crush a man's thighbone like a dry stick. Rune dodged the teeth but not the claws, which scored him deeply in half a dozen places as the hound bucked and rolled and finally managed to shake him off, springing away and then turning back, head lowered, neck bristling. It made rushes, teeth snapping with a sound like gunshots.

Behind him on the causeway, Siaran rose to her hands and knees, sobbing for breath as sight and sanity gradually returned. There were terrible sounds behind her as Jackal fought three hounds, their weight and numbers encircling and overwhelming him until he went down beneath a mass of pale bodies. In front of her, Rune and the king-dog circled, both making beast sounds. Her spear was lost. She struggled to her feet, drew her short sword with trembling hands, and walked unsteadily to the three hounds with Jackal.

Peripherally, Rune was aware of her recovery. He couldn't worry about it. The beast he fought was strong and intelligent and full of the will to live. It had realized by now that fear would not work on Rune. Not wanting to believe, it tried again, but Rune's cold primal mind absorbed the fear without pause. Rune bled green from a dozen or more wounds, the deepest in his shoulder. Bright green dripped steadily to the stones, staining the snow. The hound didn't bleed at all.

It charged, feinted, sent Rune stumbling off balance and nearly off the precipice with a swerving blow from its shoulder. He threw himself flat and skidded, and waited there for the heartbeat it took the king-dog to pounce. Then he surged up beneath it, driving his wrist-blades into the layers of pectoral muscle. The hound shifted its weight as he moved, so the stroke missed the heart and glanced off the broad breastbone. The king-dog landed on all four feet and howled, turned to face him, and sprang again. The wound hadn't slowed it down at all, but at least now its dark blood mingled with Rune's on the paving stones. Rune dodged the leap and turned to follow the hound's trajectory, hoping to catch it by surprise.

Baying sounded again from up the hill. Rune glanced that way and saw more hounds running down from the towers, fur white against the darkness, eyes glaring through the snow. The reinforcements were too great in number for his little band to succeed. With a fury born of desperation, Rune slid out his dagger as the king-dog came back for him. Mindful of the teeth, he dodged its next rush and reached up to grab the coarse fur high on the back of its neck. His handful secure, he vaulted atop the king-dog's high, bony back.

He was only there for a moment before it threw him off, but it was long enough for the dagger to go in. Rune crashed against a chunk of fallen ceiling, shattering it and sending most of it tumbling down the hill toward the darkened city below. The king-dog whirled and snapped at the hilt standing out behind its shoulder, then staggered and fell. Blood came out of his mouth.

Rune shook his head to clear it, braids flying, and crawled over to pluck the dagger from the body. He stood, trying to gauge the oncoming pack's arrival. He had only seconds. He spun around and saw Jackal and Siaran, bleeding but alive, stalking grimly toward him from three slain white shapes. Good. They stood by him, one on each side, and waited in silence with weapons drawn for the hounds to come.

They did, their terrible baying unrelenting. This time, they didn't stop. White, smash, fear, pain, an explosion of sound and agony. Rune saw Siaran's eyes go pale and strange, all color leeched from them as the fear hit her, but this time she remained upright. Her sword flashed. Jackal roared once and then fought in silence, for the few seconds he was able to stand. The fear came just before the impact of huge bodies and snapping teeth, the sheer weight of numbers bearing the three hunters back and down.

Rune fought on his back, lashing out at anything that moved, stabbing anything that touched him with claws and teeth. He lost sight of Siaran and Jackal in the fray. A new sound registered through his rage and desperation then, and he wondered at first if it was Cetanu, the dark god, calling him to take his place among the glorious dead.

A roar, savage, challenging, echoed back not by dead stone but by other living voices. Dark shapes in bright armor joined the battle, and the weight of hounds above him lessened until Rune could stand again and fight, belly deep in coarse-furred bristling bodies. He snarled, a sound of savage joy to greet his brethren: six more, the other two hunting parties. Jackal rose too, and Rune killed his way across to him until his foot struck something yielding.

Bending swiftly, he grasped Siaran's arm and hauled her to her feet, which she managed to keep under her. He fought beside her after that, and although the fear still affected her, making her movements rough and uncoordinated, she did well enough, killing two hounds on her own.

With the skill born of long practice, the warriors organized themselves into a single fighting wedge, driving back the hounds with steel and determination. Rune was happy. Here was a hunt worthy of his people, and he was fighting, killing, wild thing in a wild place, perfectly at home.

In the end, the causeway was heaped with bloody, white-furred corpses. Of the original twelve who had disembarked from the ship, seven remained. An entire team must have been lost to the hounds up among the towers, and two warriors had died in the fighting, one torn apart by the pack and one driven over the cliff.

The city was quiet again except for the bells and the blowing snow. Rune finished the death rites with the others, then went to where Siaran stood apart, staring up at the black outline of the towers against the gray night sky. Without turning to him, she said in her strange musical voice, "Those things were guarding something up there."

Rune growled. There were more warrior dead up there, too. If the hounds had been guarding something in the towers, it was no concern of his unless whatever it was interfered with recovering weapons and putting the dead to rest.

First, though, there was the matter of injury. Not one of them had emerged unscathed. Rune closed his hand on Siaran's shoulder and hauled her unceremoniously back to the others. He stared silently through his faceplate at Jackal as they joined the silent circle. Now was not the best time for Jackal to announce Rune's breaking of the challenge covenant, but then Jackal was not known for his timing.

Equally silent, the other shook his head. A reprieve, then. One day, maybe sooner, maybe later, Jackal would reveal what Rune had done. He nodded, once. It was the best he could hope for, and in any case he was not worried about that day. He was worried about this one.

He silenced Siaran's protests of his rough treatment by pulling out his medkit and showing it to her. They couldn't afford to waste time with all the messy tape and cotton wads she'd used before. Rune opened the kit and scooped up two fingers of blue gel. With his other hand, he touched the mark on Siaran's forehead to remind her to be strong. She watched him, not understanding; Rune gave a brief, humorless chuckle. She would, soon enough.

Careful of his talons, he smeared the goo along her sides, face, arm, and stooped to do the same with the fang punctures on both her legs: everywhere her red blood showed. There was a lot of it and he worked fast, knowing it would hurt her; she gasped and trembled but stood still, just as she had when the corrosive blood had burned the brand into her skin. Rune nodded in approval after he'd finished, and began dabbing the stuff on his own wounds, the pain making him hiss.

He noted with approval that the healing gel worked just as quickly on her as it did on his own people. The bleeding stopped and began to crust over. Siaran took deep, controlled breaths, the strange protuberance that housed her nostrils flexing. Then she gripped her sword firmly and smiled at him.

Invigorated and a little rested, the reduced party turned their faces to the silent towers above and continued the climb. Somewhere up there were the bodies of their comrades, and perhaps something else waited for them, something that had sent the deadly telepathic pack of hounds out to kill nearly half their number.


	14. Fear in a Handful of Dust

_Note: Once again, I'm so pleased to have intelligent reviewers and enthusiastic readers for this piece. Thank you all for coming along on this journey with me and, by extension, Siaran, Rune, Jackal, and company. Going by my internal framework for this story, the tale's about two-thirds told and will soon be moving toward the wrap party. Each of you is invited, but before we get there, there's more to tell and perhaps even conflict, choice, more conflict, and if I'm very lucky, resolution._

_Dithering aside, I must give credit where it's due - even, in this case, to the dead. Many of you expressed curiosity about and approval of the telepathic white hounds. Much as I would like to say they're my creation, and could maybe even get away with it in some circles, I would be sitting on a throne of lies to do so. Their true name is Northhounds, and I borrowed them from Leigh Brackett's Book of Skaith. Except for their existence in an equatorial region of my unnamed, dead planet, they are in every way identical to Brackett's Flay, Gerd, Grith, Mika, and all the others. I decided to use them because they seemed an appropriately ferocious and worthy prey for the Yautja, and because the hero of the series, Eric John Stark, could well have run with the Predators himself, had they been created in Brackett's lifetime._

_That said, Chapter 13 should be retrospectively dedicated to her memory._

_This chapter is dedicated to **syverasazyn**, because without her guidance and damn-the-torpedos attitude at a time of need, I might not have finished it, and abandoned the story to die._

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**Chapter 14 – Fear in a Handful of Dust**

Somehow, Siaran held the tremors that wracked her to mere outward shivers and chattering teeth. It was no use blaming them on the cold; even though her skinsuit was torn in numerous places (and her beloved _do bohk _shredded where the dog had clawed her), its thermal properties continued to work just fine. Siaran was under no illusions. Cold didn't make every muscle feel made of water, every bone of jelly. The physical sensation alone would have made it hard to force her legs to move. What made it worse was that she didn't want to.

When she'd told Rune the dog-things must have been guarding something up in the towers, she hadn't meant she'd wanted to go there. She'd been speaking mostly to see if she could, trying to recover her mental structures.

She remembered the fear, and tried not to. To have her will to fight stripped away, to be so stricken by terror that she could do nothing but curl into a ball and sob and wait for death, was a humiliation so deep that it shook the fundaments of her identity. She still hadn't recovered. Knowing that she hadn't been able to resist and overcome that awful mind-bolt of fear the way the hunters had was no help either.

The blue stuff Rune smeared on her injuries replaced ice with fire. She bore it in silence, grateful for the pain and disturbed by that, too. She had never been a masochist. Pain was a hardship to be endured, an opponent to be mastered. Until now, it had not been something to embrace.

However, it was preferable to fear. The images that had dominated her mind while she lay submissive to the white demon dogs were still vivid enough that she stared at nothing for long moments now, not blinking. It hurt when she finally closed her lids over too-dry corneas, and Siaran embraced that, too, not liking it.

As the hunters finished patching themselves up, they moved to the white-furred bodies and began claiming trophies. Small ones: fangs and paws, no skulls; things that were easy to string on a belt or necklace. They were in a hurry. Siaran stood woodenly through this, leaning on her spear, remote and withdrawn and cold to the center of her being. Rune pried two long canine teeth from the animals she'd felled, glanced at her, and dropped them into a pouch at his belt.

They wasted no time pounding their chests and roaring, but fell grimly into file for the hike up to the towers. Siaran was in a daze, unable to make her feet march with them. One moved past her and she knew without looking that it was Rune. The ridiculous, impossible urge to reach out and touch him swept through her. She clamped her teeth together until her jaw ached, but could not overcome the uncertainty and terror that still lingered in her mind. She wasn't strong enough yet to stand on her own. Without Rune, Jackal probably would have killed her. The dogs certainly would have.

Her self-control was so thin just then that if Rune was human, she might've huddled sobbing against him, seeking the uncomplicated comfort of touch. As it was, she felt dangerously close to it. "Bad idea," she mumbled through chattering teeth.

Her feet, which had resisted movement even when she commanded them, walked delicately around the huge white-furred corpses and fell into step with Rune through no decision of hers. Siaran stuck to the big hunter like a shadow and looked resolutely ahead, hating herself for being weak enough to need someone else. Rune, on the other hand, seemed neither to mind nor to notice. He only lifted his head to stare at Jackal, who stalked ahead, then sort of quivered once all over, like he was shaking off a chill.

The reunited group walked on the bones of a city they'd once thought dead. They went slowly now, scanning the portions of broken roof and the shattered columns, their helmeted, braided heads moving constantly. Every shadow held potential danger. Occasionally, the hunters chattered softly to themselves or each other. The rapid, dry clicking cut through the ceaseless chiming of the bells, which now seemed to hold some unspoken threat.

Siaran, afraid that if she started jumping at shadows she'd end up jumping off the ledge, trusted the hunters to warn her if something else attacked, and concentrated on keeping her feet moving. At first, she walked like an automaton and her mind felt as numb as her body, shielding itself from the recent overload. Gradually, the process of moving thawed her out, and her limbs regained some of their old fluid motion. The hitches and stutters in her mind smoothed out a little, too, and relief spread warmth through her as she began to think in rational terms again, instead of rabbit-minded furtive fright.

Rune must have noticed the difference in her movements, because he gave a very soft growl that nobody else heard, and looked briefly sideways at her. Siaran slid her eyes across and saw the dull gleam of metal and the shadow-fall of hair turned in her direction. She nodded once, a sketched movement of her head, trying to tell him she was okay. Rattled, but okay.

He seemed satisfied, and continued his scanning for things more dangerous but less near at hand.

Siaran realized that, after her mental reboot, she had a million questions for him. Why had he interrupted the fight with Jackal? Because of the dog pack? How had he known they were coming? Why hadn't he just let her die once it became clear she was incapable of standing against the hounds on her own? Would she still have to fight Jackal for her life later, and what was all that about anyway? She thought there was some weird kind of tension between Rune and Jackal now that hadn't been there before, so had Rune done something wrong by interrupting the fight, or was he just pissed at Jackal for starting it at such a bad moment?

The questions crowded into her head with no outlet, building curiosity on curiosity, fighting off the remaining effects of hound-fear. In comprehension, Siaran let them build and kept her mouth shut. She was used to silence by now, and knew that even if she asked, most of her questions wouldn't get answered anyway—at least, not by conventional means.

It took the reunited group more than twenty minutes to hike the half mile up the winding causeway to the base of the towers. Despite their precautions, or maybe because of them, there had not been a stir of movement. The towers were silent in their broken watchfulness, still as death. Siaran distrusted them.

Before the foot of the central and grandest tower, the path spread out in a broad expanse of gray-white stone. The wind swept the stone continually bare of snow, so that it fell over the side of the cutaway hill in a misty, tenuous cascade. Siaran placed her feet with care in case the stone was slick, but beneath her boots it felt unpleasantly gritty and dry as dust.

They stopped at the edge of the high terrace. The hunters formed a loose semicircle like a drawn bow, pointing at the towers, with Siaran close beside Rune at the inside of the left end. Their postures became hunched and menacing: heads down but angled forward, feet braced, arms out from their sides with hands ready near weapons. Siaran made herself draw the short sword she had somehow managed to keep hold of. The snow skirled around them and the wind howled, setting the bells into a fresh clamor.

She could see them now. Bells hung in all sizes from cables stretched between the turrets, or depended from narrow standing stones set up specifically to house more of them. Above and around them, the silent towers pointed skyward, a jagged set of accusing fingers. They marched backward, flanking the central keep with their lesser height, forming a wedge that capped the hill's crown. Siaran turned in a slow circle, looking down at the city below. There was the bridge, nearly as high as the hill she stood on, with the great pit of darkness below it, its steppes lost in distance and darkness. On the other side of the narrow climbing path was the central square, and beyond that the broken gates that led out of the city.

Completing her circle, she appraised the towers. They had looked black against the starlit sky, before the clouds had closed in. Now, in the eerie gray of the snowy night, Siaran thought they had once been white.

If she closed her eyes, she could almost picture the city as it might have been in its days of triumph and strength: the proud white towers overlooking a thriving, walled metropolis with markets and families and soldiers in training. It might have been beautiful, a shining and queenly paragon of a city on the lush, fruit-bearing plain.

If she closed her eyes. But she didn't. She looked up instead, until her throat stretched and she could feel the back of her skull cushioned by her shoulders, and her long braid brushed against the base of her spine. The once-white towers were grimy with age and scoured by wind and time, and even with her limited human senses stretched to the utmost, she had no sense of anything except complete and utter stillness. The hounds had come from these towers, but the hounds were no more.

Still, they must have fed somehow. It disturbed Siaran that there was no sign of life that she or, judging by the queried-trill notes around her, the hunters could sense.

It looked as if the towers had been broken by war. A gate had once walled off the entrance to the upper city, just where they were standing. The imprint of heavy blocks still marred the marble-looking stuff they stood on. Shards and chunks of stone and rusted metal still lay about, though it seemed most of the wrecked gate had long ago plummeted off the cliff, down to the lower city. The doors looked made of iron and as if they had been finely wrought, but they, too, twisted crazily off their hinges by a force more violent and swift than age or weather.

Siaran pondered those doors even as she dreaded what lay beyond them. Maybe, as the waning sun had caused widespread crop failure in the planet's temperate zones, the starving hordes had closed in from north and south upon this equatorial city and its bountiful lands. An army, driven by hunger and desperation, might have done this sort of damage, looting the city without regard for rank or sanctity, just to find something to eat.

She shivered, and wondered if the hound pack that lay dead on the causeway below were descendants of the city guardians from that terrible time, or another like it. No matter what scenario she imagined, she couldn't find one that ended well for the city's inhabitants. And she and the predators had wiped out every living thing they'd so far found, the pockets of survivors that still hung on to life on a dying planet because they had nowhere else to go.

Siaran had little sympathy for them. The methods they used for survival pretty much meant it was either her or them. But she felt a keen stab of desolation for their forebears, who must have seen their doom coming, wearing the faces of hunger, cold, and darkness, and been helpless to stop it.

Satisfied that nothing else was about to charge out of the ruined doorway, the six hunters moved toward the main tower door. Siaran jerked out of her reverie and went with them. It was strange, after surviving the brutal training regimen with Rune and Jackal, that she should be so much more afraid now than on the night, a lifetime ago, that she had fought alien insect-dragons in a sandstorm and met the predatory Rune. She'd have thought she'd be used to such things by now.

But she wanted nothing more from this planet than to be gone from it, to leave it to its last few decades of waning existence before it finally froze to death. She didn't belong here, and found it impossible to be at ease simply because she was in a hunting environment, as Rune and his kin seemed to be. Their feet scrunched on the gritty white stone, the doors loomed ahead, and then over. They passed inside the tower.

It was dark, unsurprisingly. Siaran wondered if she'd was doomed to not being able to see what was about to eat her as long as she kept her present company. She felt the sense of space compress to each side and imagined they must be walking down a narrow hallway. The air above was colder; probably a very high ceiling. Anything could be waiting in the still darkness. Hounds, or something worse. She inched forward, eyes wide and unseeing in the dark. Searing imagination sent her pulse pounding a tattoo against her breastbone, and she began to breathe in shallow pants through her mouth.

She made it about twenty paces before her feet stuttered and then balked completely. Her endocrine system, only thinly under conscious control, kicked into high gear again with the deprivation of her most-developed sense. Thought was suspended in favor of reflex action. Siaran froze into a defensive crouch, ready to bolt back out onto the high platform at the slightest provocation. Her breathing accelerated, harsh on the dead air, and the back of her throat tasted dusty and metallic, making it hard to swallow.

She had been walking so close to Rune that she felt him pause with her and swing around, towering over her, staring down at her through whatever weird spectrum allowed him to see in blackness. The air compressed, a slight breeze in her face as he moved an arm toward her. Siaran swung defensively, connected with some part of him, then flinched back two steps, tripped, and fell backwards. She let go of the sword and smacked her forearms to the hard dusty floor, widespread to save skull, tailbone, and wrists. She fell the way she'd been taught. That trained reflex, at least, was still there.

Close at hand came a low chatter of impatience, almost a curse, and she was yanked roughly upright. Two large, clawed hands dug into each shoulder and shook her as she found her feet. Siaran struggled and kicked out, losing her footing again so that Rune was holding all her weight.

Abruptly she felt herself lifted higher, and then the air left her lungs in a sharp whoosh as her back connected solidly with a wall. Her head, which she'd managed to protect from her fall, smacked against stone. Bright spots flashed in her vision, but before she could blink them away, cold metal pushed against her face, flattening her nose and clicking against her teeth as she opened her mouth in surprise. She felt curved angles and molded hollows, and a puff of filtered air on her skin. Rune's faceplate.

She went still, tense, but no longer trying to escape. The angry growl, the whisper of breath through steel, overwhelmed her senses. There was terrible urgency in the contact that broke through her near panic. Siaran fought to breathe normally, her most basic recourse of control. After a few panting breaths, she began to draw air more deeply. The frantic rush of blood in her head slowed. "Get a grip," she whispered indistinctly, lips mashed against the thin layer of metal that separated their faces. She closed her eyes, willing away the unpleasant image of tusks and fangs millimeters away from her fragile skin. No doubt they were bared in anger, too.

He was right. She'd been trained better than this, and not just by him. "I got it. Okay. You can put me down now."

Rune did, so suddenly that she staggered when her feet touched the floor again. He hissed from off to her left. A second later, she felt something cold nudge her right hand and grasped it automatically, doing her best not to anticipate that it might be something horrible. That was the only way to get through this: to exist in and react to this moment and not imagine what might happen the next.

Her hand curled around the now-familiar hilt of the sword she'd dropped in her fall. She hefted it and nodded, knowing he could see her even though the gesture was instinctively meaningless to her in the dark.

A coughing roar came from somewhere up ahead. Siaran was familiar with that sound by now: it was a calling-together, tinged with impatience. Rune hissed again, and to her complete surprise he grasped her left wrist, pulled it to his belt where her fingers quickly explored the texture and shape, telling her brain what she touched. He let go, and her fingers tightened on his belt of their own accord. Rune began to move, swiftly enough to catch up with the others. Siaran did her best to run along with him, a death grip on his belt with one hand and her sword with the other.

"Thanks, Rune," she whispered as they ran, and was grateful when he didn't respond. Maybe he hadn't heard her, which was probably best. She'd never thanked him for anything before.

She hung on even after they caught up to the others, who had stopped. The air spun in slow currents around them, and despite her impression of a vast open space, it was warm. She began to sweat, and the thermal suit instantly wicked the moisture and grew cooler against her skin.

She could no longer hear the bells. From somewhere below their feet, there was a new sound: a low hum like that of high-tension wires, only so faint it was more like the whisper of a hum. Siaran listened hard, her head cocked in the darkness in an attitude very like Rune's whenever he was curious. She wondered if, improbably, there could still be some sort of generator running in the depths of the tower cluster, warming the air and doing who knew what else besides.

There was no way of telling from here where the hounds had kenneled, or what they fed on. Did they hunt the creatures in the lower cities? Was the entire hill under the towers hollow, supporting some other form of life they'd not yet encountered, protected from the cold outside but preyed on by the hounds? Or was some controlling force still alive to feed them?

The hunters moved into a huddle and conferred in soft clicks and chatters. Their voices were by now so familiar that she could almost catch elusive syllables, guttural consonants and sharp vowels, very clipped and precise. Low as their conversation was, it covered the elusive power-hum sound.

Siaran relaxed a fraction, then took more serious advantage of the break to breathe deeply, refocusing her determination and delving deep into her psyche to find a center of calm. Whatever had happened between her and Jackal, she was still part of Rune's team, and determined not to be a weak link in it. The near break she'd had was bad enough. It couldn't happen again, not if she had to face a thousand demon hounds.

The semi-meditation and stern pep talk made her feel a little better. However, it was not without self-deprecation that she noticed how the fingers of her left hand refused to let go of Rune's belt. In the dark, at least, she still needed his strength to feed her own. Disquiet stirred as she realized that she didn't hate it so much this time.

Then they were on the move again, more purposefully, and Siaran trotted along at the rear, trailing close on Rune's heels. He stopped once and she smacked hard into three hundred pounds of unyielding bone and muscle. With her nose stinging and eyes watering, Siaran recovered and held still, ears stretched for the wire-hum or any other sound beyond the stealthy ones the group was making, wondering what had alerted him.

Then she heard a dry, sibilant rattle that was almost a purr, and realized Rune was laughing. "Very funny," she hissed, and dug the pommel of her sword vindictively into his ribs. The little joke had the desired effect, though, and despite the temporary elevation in her heart rate, it went a long way to restoring Siaran's well-being. Just like all the times on the sparring floor when she'd felt too tired and hurt to continue, and wanted despite all her determination and years of prior training to quit, Rune was building her back up.

The floor shifted, began to ascend gently, and the air again compressed into a space that felt like a high, narrow corridor. She stopped smiling to concentrate on her feet, which crunched through layers of grit that might have accumulated through immeasurable centuries. The group moved more slowly again. A light grew, so dim that it was nearly a minute before Siaran realized that sight had returned and that instead of solid blackness, she was looking at the solid black silhouettes of the hunters in front of her. Each was ringed in cold blue light, so faintly that at first she kept losing the light in darkness again.

It grew stronger. Her eyes adjusted, seeing here and there a dull gleam of metal off armor, the movement of an arm or leg or heavy body, the swing of corded hair. It was an immense relief to be able to see again. The faint clink of armor and metal hair beads receded, became less menacing, as her eyes took in the environment. There wasn't much to see: just a curving stone passage, about ten feet tall by five wide, sloping steadily up. The air was dry and a little warmer, and the stonework had suffered little decay despite the grit on the floor. Without thinking, Siaran let go of Rune.

She could see now that the light came from dim blue globes, set at intervals along the wall in shallow square alcoves. The passage curved as it rose, so that no more than two or three of the dim globes were visible at once. She stood on tiptoe to peer at one, but could see no sconce or holder, nor feel any heat from the hazy ball of light. Unsettled and not knowing why, she hurried to catch back up to Rune, who this time had not waited.

The passage curled endlessly upward, its floor smooth, its walls bare of any other ornament. Siaran's calves began to feel the climb. She had no way of telling why the hunters had chosen to come this way. The vast open space below had given her the impression of a multitude of openings on all sides of a huge chamber. The stir of air currents wouldn't have existed as strongly as they had if the room had just one entrance and exit.

But she'd decided to trust them, and they'd been able to see things she hadn't. _This moment_, she reminded herself, and paid strict attention. She raised her foot to make the next step, but instead of meeting smooth-rising stone, it found only empty air before connecting with a muffled slap on a horizontal floor. They'd reached the top of the passage, and a room opened up before them.

It was circular and very large, maybe a hundred feet in diameter, its walls cut in regular alcoves where the blue globes hung. The ceiling was lost in darkness overhead; the globes gave off just enough light to see by but illuminated very little.

They illuminated enough. Siaran and the hunters were in a museum. While the center of the vast floor was bare, its outer edges and walls were piled and hung with countless things that gleamed dully in the blue light. Fascinated, the group moved outward to examine the artifacts. Tapestries and paintings hung on the walls, most faded with age but some still visible: mass movements of armies, hooded men on leggy camel-like creatures, fierce-eyed folk fishing a winter sea, white-robed figures with snowy beards and serene faces giving mass benedictions. Rolled-up rugs were stacked neatly in pyramids, some covered protectively by furs or finely-worked cloths.

There were piles of musical instruments, high shelves of books and scrolls, and racks of armor and weapons. Most of these last looked made more for beauty than for killing; under the dust of years, the scrollwork on the plate armor was fine, the steel hammered thin. The swords had ornate, jeweled hilts and looked so fragile that they might come apart at the tang if touched.

Siaran wandered along the wall toward the only other entrance, a dark archway opposite the one they'd come up through. It was not difficult to imagine some wise group of elders creating this room as their planet's civilizations suffered and starved around them. They would have left the best of everything they had created, a record of information, art, technology, and history to live on beyond them and maybe, one day, be found on their half-frozen rock of a planet, so that others would know what had happened to them.

She thought of Voyager 1, launched three years before she'd been born, bearing its tiny golden cargo of information and hope into the unknown space beyond the Oort Cloud. This room was the equivalent of Voyager's gold phonograph record, and so much more besides. And it had been found by a culture whose dominant impulse was to hunt and gather trophies. These inert things, books and statuary and even weapons, were meaningless to Siaran's companions. It would be nothing to pick up an object in this room. No battle, no earning of the right to ownership. They would rather have the teeth that still dripped on their belts from the slaughtered hounds.

She turned away, unable to bear it. Strange, she thought, that despite her profound sense of sadness for these lost civilizations, she felt no compulsion to take away even the smallest memento from this room. Maybe Rune and his buddies were rubbing off on her.

Her nose twitched, and a shot of adrenaline all but liquefied her heart as she recognized the now-familiar smell of hunter blood, untainted by the astringent smell of the blue gel the others reeked of. She tensed, and saw in the cold blue gloom that the others had done so as well, dropping into fighting stances with their heads all lifted, using every natural and technological sense available to scan the artifact-filled room.

At the foot of the new archway, just a few steps from where she stood, were humped black shapes. At first it was hard to tell whether they were just more artifacts, but as she got closer, Siaran could see that they were not. She drew in a sharp breath that was almost a hiss. Two of the hunters moved past her swiftly, drawing a variety of blades. They knelt over the shapes for a long, still moment. Then they made a sound, and Rune at her side made a sound, and the other three echoed it. It was soft, explosive, and held the merest touch of grief.

They had found the lost hunting party.

Siaran crossed the last few steps, her throat tight. She made herself look at what the hounds had done. One of the bodies had been reduced to bone and armor, and there were tooth marks on those. The other two had been partially devoured, and might have been in the same shape as the first if some alarm had not set off the pack again. Maybe all the dogs had needed as a warning was the proximity of living minds.

Close up, she could see the evidence of the fight. Green blood glinted dully in the blue light, mixed with a darker substance—hound blood, maybe—on the floors and walls, and spattered the ancient objects in the vicinity. Some of the artifacts had been smashed in the struggle. Siaran's scalp prickled and she backed up a few steps, not liking to stand on the spot where one of the hunters had died.

Her companions had no such qualms. Each of the six surviving warriors stooped to recover weapons from the bodies, as Siaran had seen Rune do with his dead partner in the Gobi. The procedure seemed callous to her, yet also made perfect sense. The group was in hostile territory, and couldn't afford to either waste weapons nor linger over their dead. What they did was driven by pragmatism and necessity. Besides, she remembered Rune's devastating howl over the body of his comrade and thought that this group would do the same now if in more comfortable territory.

Siaran didn't want to browse the museum any further; its vast echo of a civilization forever lost was too disturbing. So she stared at the floor to avoid watching the grisly scene of her companions stripping the mangled corpses.

She frowned then, and backed up a few more steps. There was a pattern in the stones of the floor. She could just about make it out in the eerie dim light. The colors were dull and blurred with age, but it was clear that the stones were laid out in a radiating pattern from the center of the room, to disappear beneath the bulk of countless artifacts. Almost a sunburst, but not quite. The colors alternated light and dark. Each came to a sharp point in the middle and then widened toward the walls.

She realized what the pattern reminded her of: the spokes on a dartboard. The light-colored stone had strange jags through it, as if whoever had created the design wanted to give an impression of something sharp and ragged and painful. The dark spokes held a more rounded pattern, repeating itself along the length of each wedge and somehow disturbing.

Siaran leaned closer to a dark wedge. It was a face, identical as far as she could tell, repeated in a slightly lighter pattern on the black, almost invisible in the half light. It leered up at her, its mouth a hollow O, its eyes slitted and malevolent. A jack-o-lantern face, with a huge mouth open to swallow the world.

Behind her, the hunters worked swiftly to drag the bodies out of the doorway, placing each of their fallen kin on his back in a neat row below a tangle of statuary. Rune clicked to get Siaran's attention and she jumped, relieved to have a reason to no longer look at the disturbing tiles on the floor. Without a sound passing between any of them, the hunters crowded through the archway to see what the group had discovered there just before it was attacked.

The passageway beyond the circular room was very narrow and unlighted, but mercifully short. The hunters' armored shoulders barely fit between the walls; Siaran ghosted through easily. The corridor opened into a much smaller room, also circular, with more of the cold blue globes placed around the walls. Here the hunters slowed, huffing in disappointment and milling around in the tight quarters. A dead end. They started probing at the walls and floors, staring up at the high ceiling, looking for some hidden exit. Siaran shoved her way through to see what ancient treasures had been left here.

In that room was only one thing. An altar.

It was a massive block of white stone, cracked down the middle but still level. In the middle of its broad surface stood three carven figures, the smallest between the two larger ones. A man, a woman, and a child. But that wasn't all. The carvings were beautifully realized, and horrifying in the detail of that realization. Siaran stepped up to the altar, whose broad surface reached nearly to her chin, and stared. She forgot about the hunters, about everything except what she was seeing and the connections going on in her head.

The carving of the man had the same face as the one she'd seen repeated in the floor mosaic out in the artifact room: malevolent eyes and a wide-open mouth. He was carved from ebony stone or wood, and one arm reached out, fingers spread and hooked into claws. The arm was disproportionately long, the fingers even more so: a dark hand stretching out to close over the observer. He was swathed in a black cloak that flared out forever in an invisible, unfelt wind.

The woman was his opposite. She was wrought from pure white alabaster or marble, completely naked, stunning in her nearly-human proportions. Her face was remote, serene, and somehow infinitely cruel in its beauty. Her hair was carved into jags of ice, like a frozen waterfall, and in her raised hand she held a clear shard of crystal.

Between the man and the woman was a child, and that little god-figure disturbed Siaran most of all. The child was also naked, either female or sexless, carved from dull gray stone that did no justice to the craftsmanship of the carving. The child's hands were raised, cupped together as if offering or asking for something. The face was piercingly sweet, elfin and smiling. But the smile was too wide, and the tiny teeth were pointed razors, not unlike the faces of the lithe people she and Rune and Jackal had slaughtered down in the subterranean field.

Worst of all, despite its lovely face, the child was starving. The limbs were skeletal sticks, the belly pinched, and every rib showed in cruel detail.

Siaran stared at the idols on the altar, seeing them for what they must be: gods. What was it she had thought earlier? Darkness, cold, and hunger had destroyed the planet, and its intelligent population, in slow terrible degrees. She looked at the black man with his cloak and claw: darkness. At the white woman with her frozen hair and her shard of ice-crystal: cold. At the starving gray child: hunger.

"They worshiped them," she whispered, and felt the sting of tears. At some point after the planet's long dying had begun, its people had in the end turned to this. Once they might have worshiped the sun, but that had failed them. Had it really been so horrible that they ended up making gods of the forces that had destroyed them? Or was that some perversion of their nature? Could they have been so terrible that they deserved, or _wanted_, this fate? She didn't know. She couldn't. It wasn't, she realized, for her to decide. Some things would always be bigger than she was, beyond understanding.

An inquisitive purr interrupted her thrall. Siaran blinked, took one long, shuddering breath, and looked up to see Rune. Jackal was right behind him, his body rigid with tension. Rune said her name, in English, in his own voice. "Siarrran."

She stared up at him, wondering why he used her name now. Just to get her attention? He could have just used his impatient click-growl, the way he usually did. For a confused moment she wondered if he was sympathizing with her bleak thoughts about the frightening trio of gods on the altar. But Rune had paid as little attention to the idols as any of the others, once it was clear they held no threat. He huffed once behind his faceplate; Siaran had the impression he was struggling to say something else.

"Hunt you," he told her finally in his raspy whisper. His head dropped, chin on his chest, eye lenses downcast. Submission.

"Hunt _me_?" she asked, her confusion growing. She got more uncomfortable the longer they stayed in this place. There was nothing up here to attack them, no reason to linger in this museum-turned-mausoleum, and now Rune was getting all cryptic on her. "Who? What do you mean?" she demanded, more sharply than she intended.

In answer, Jackal warbled a warning at her, aggression in every line of his body. Rune's head snapped up; he turned to face the third member of their group with a snarl that drowned him out. Jackal stood straight and unmoving, showing his greater height to its best advantage, while Rune growled steadily at him, refusing to be cowed. Siaran felt the frisson of tension between them, although none of the others seemed to notice. For a beat, she wondered if they were about to attack each other.

Then they both relaxed. Rune shifted marginally in Siaran's direction, and Jackal finally looked away, barking an irritated-sounding query to the others. They all chattered softly and began to file back to the doorway, their inspection of the chamber complete. There was no secret trapdoor here, nothing left to find or hunt.

For once, Siaran agreed with Jackal. It was time to go; whatever Rune was trying to tell her could wait. She waited near the altar for the hunters to squeeze their bulky selves back through the narrow passage to the artifact room. Suddenly, despite her aversion to the disturbing idols, Siaran felt that she ought to take something of this planet back with her.

Everything seemed both vivid and surreal: landing on a dying planet, discovering that it still held intelligent life, and that it had once held so much more—if she made it back to Earth, how could she ever tell what she knew? It didn't seem possible. But she would take one thing, one small keepsake of her time here, so that if she survived she would remember the terrible loneliness of this place.

She reached up to the altar and closed a careful hand around the smallest idol, the gray stone figure of the hunger-child. It lifted easily, not moored to the white surface as she'd feared. She hefted it gently in her palm and in the next instant dropped it with a small thud back to the altar. She snatched her hand back, looking for signs of damage on her palm.

The stone figurine had grown first icy cold, then scalding hot, so quickly that it had seemed to move. There was no sign of frostbite or blister on her flesh; just smudges of dust from where she'd touched the little statue. She blew cautiously on her skin, but the dust was just dust: the top layer puffed into the dim air. Siaran rubbed her fingers together to get rid of the rest. The stuff felt strangely greasy on her skin.

She must have made a startled noise, because Rune and one or two of the others came crowding back to see what had alerted her. Shamefaced, she said nothing. The little statue lay facedown at the feet of its mother-goddess. Siaran didn't try to pick it up again.

They were about to turn away when, deep inside the altar, something heavy groaned and moved, stone rubbing on stone. Siaran, Rune, and the others took a synchronized step back. The sound seemed to drop lower, through the floor, growing fainter as it went down. There was brief silence while nobody moved.

Then the high-wire hum zoomed into audibility, thrumming up through the floor, building in pitch and power until it filled their heads with a resounding bass note. Siaran felt it vibrate in her ear bones, her throat, through the soles of her boots. Her feet seemed to be shaking. She clapped her hands to her ears, afraid her eardrums would burst from the onslaught of sound. The hunters roared in protest of the noise, which continued to build—not to a shriek, but an awesome sonic wave that shook their flesh and seemed even to upset the rhythm of their heartbeats.

That was when Siaran realized it wasn't her feet that were shaking. It was the _floor_. She threw one panicked look at Rune, who grabbed her wrist and with a practiced yank hauled her further from the altar. He chattered urgently, a sound taken up by Jackal, and then then they were all running, shoving through the narrow arch, pounding back through the hall and the artifact room, sprinting for the opposite entrance.

Behind them, the terrible sonic vibration blew the stone altar and its beautiful, awful triple gods to powder. The explosion was tremendous. It rocked the floor under their feet, which in its turn began to crack and splinter, breaking up the light-dark mosaic. Paintings fell from the walls, their fragile frames shattering on impact. Tapestries crumbled to dust under the onslaught of sound. Surviving strings on the musical instruments took up the sonic wave and threw it back in violent discord, then were themselves consumed by the vibrations. Statuary exploded in pistol cracks, sending shards flying. Dust rose in a choking cloud.

Whatever counter-reaction Siaran had triggered by touching the idol seemed bound to shake the towers apart. The group was high up; if they didn't get out, they'd be destroyed when the ancient stone crumbled to its foundations. And what if the devastation spread—what if she had started some terrible self-destruct sequence powered by the generator-hum from far below? It seemed likely that she had. Maybe the hounds had been the forward defense, and nothing was ever supposed to be removed from the towers, especially not the altar pieces. Siaran could believe just about anything of a people who ended up worshiping the things that had destroyed them.

Even if they made it out of the towers, there was long, broken causeway on its high cliff, and below that the courtyard, and the massive ancient beams that held the wall and the gate. Countless thousands of tons of stone to fall and smash and bury them all forever.

_No. Don't think about how to get out. Don't, or you'll never make it. Just run._

She left the physical memory of an entire planet to its doom, and ran.


	15. Then Spoke Thunder

**Chapter 15 – Then Spoke Thunder**

The blue globes shimmied in their nooks, sending the fleeing group's dim shadows leaping and stuttering all around. As they dashed into the tunnel that spiraled down from the artifact room to the ground floor, Siaran feared that the tower that housed the ramp would collapse on top of them before they'd gone halfway. The immediate stability of the floor in the tunnel proved her fears groundless; the tower seemed more integral than that of the broad floors, maybe as a result of independent construction.

That didn't, however, mean they were safe; just that their deaths were fractionally less imminent. They ran hell-for-leather down the ramp, skidding much of the time and pinballing off the walls and each other. Somebody's armor embedded itself in the meat of Siaran's upper arm, adding to her already large collection of woes from that day, but she scarcely felt it. Wrenching away, she caromed off the curving wall, felt the stonework shudder and split, stumbled, slid a few feet with arms spread, regained her balance, and ran even faster.

The horrible sonics were reduced by the thick stone of the ramp tower, but they could all hear the rending and crashing as the destruction continued above them. It was only a matter of time before the pulse of sound affected the tower, too. The hunters ran in silence save for the pounding of heavy feet on dusty floor. They were hampered by the downward slope and the constant right-hand spiral, but all of them went as fast as they could.

Siaran fell when they reached the ground floor, tripping over her own feet as she ran into pure darkness and the horizontal surface of the unseen great hall. She tucked her chin and dropped her shoulder out of reflexive habit, and before she knew quite what had happened, she had rolled into a standing position and was running again. Amazing, she thought fleetingly, what the body was capable of when its existence was threatened. She couldn't have done a diving forward roll at such speed and so well on a soft training mat in broad daylight, but she'd managed it in the dark on uncertain ground.

A great crash interrupted her brief self-congratulation and sent her heart leaping against her ribs. The stone floor shuddered, nearly making her fall again. She staggered hugely, limbs akimbo, feeling the strain and effort of her muscles to balance on the heaving surface. The awful sound picked up again, and the ages-old stone of the great hall sent it back in monster echoes and groans as its huge supporting columns began to split, crumble, and fall.

Siaran ran blind, not even sure if she was going in the right direction. Her breathing, already harsh, took on an hysterical wheeze. Those muscles not already working full-time tensed in preparation for the impact of thousands of pounds of crushing marble. She might have run smack into a wall and not known it; this feeling of being threatened and unable to see or prevent the consequences was worse than the Gobi sandstorm.

Once again, she was saved from disaster by a needle-tipped hand wrapped firmly around her arm, and hauled bodily through a smaller space until she could see a growing dim light ahead: the gray night of outside. She ran harder, almost outpacing her hunter escort, who barked and gave her arm a yank to keep her with him.

"Rune?" she gasped, and her companion growled affirmative. Of course. They were going to have a chat, later, about retrofitting one of the night-vision faceplates to her own head. She was getting tired of being rescued in the dark.

If there was a later. With a shattering boom, the archway behind them collapsed and they skidded to their knees from the resultant shockwave onto the cold white patio, high above the city.

The towers were destroying themselves from within, collapsing with a terrible crunching of stone on stone, sending up friction sparks and clouds of choking dust. Piercing through even that cacophony, the sonic pulse went on and on, pitched to low frequency and high decibels that were agony to the very earth. The bells ceased their chiming and took up the sound in a single gigantic, sonorous toll. It lasted only an instant before the roar of collapsing stone was overlain by the shriek of a million clappers and metal bodies as the bells were destroyed by the sound they strove to replicate.

Siaran felt as if the noise would shake her teeth loose from her skull. She risked a glance back over her shoulder, and what she saw drove her to her feet again. Wrenching her arm from Rune's grasp, she ran for the causeway before it was too late.

A high tower had detached itself from its broad base, fragments of bounding rock smashing to the white stone ahead of its collapse. The narrow, crumbling shape wavered for a few seconds, then toppled toward them from its lofty perch atop the bulwark.

The warriors turned and sprinted after Siaran. She had reached the treacherous footing on the path and was leaping along it like a gazelle, spending as much time in the air as she could to avoid the fissures that began to split its surface. The warriors imitated her to much greater effect; their muscles were made for jumping, and they were able to clear a dozen or more yards at a time with each bound. So doing, the five caught Siaran before she reached the courtyard below.

"Go," Rune snapped in English when she slowed, imbuing the word with such rough urgency that Siaran obeyed without thinking, driving her feet into the rumbling, splintering flagstones. Together, they crossed the vast courtyard as around them the ground shook and the walls fell down. The surge of adrenaline buzzing through her system was beyond what Siaran had ever experienced in a fight, when she was able to evaluate her opponent and alter her strategy accordingly. But this was simply running for her life; no planning or systematic approach would save her, and the thought made her as fleet as the wind.

The vast posts that supported the massive, broken gates were swaying and groaning as if in a high wind as they approached, running flat out. The remaining slab of bronze and iron that had once been the city's first defense tore away from its massive valves and hinges with an agonizing squeal, and collapsed in a thunder of dust. The sonic pulse was weaker out here, but the damage was already done and rippling outward.

They reached the gate supports. Instead of slowing at the sight of the awesome collapse of the gate in front of them, the hunters put on a fresh burst of speed. It was their only way out, and the odds of making it safely lessened by the second. Siaran managed to lengthen her stride just a fraction more. Massive armored forms, with corded hair flying and long legs lifting, reaching, spurning, and lifting again, bounded atop the yard-thick fallen gate. Clawed, booted feet thudded on the twisted metal. Siaran darted in their wake, lean and light as a wraith in canvas cloth, her footfalls a whispered echo of theirs.

Just in time, the small group swept beyond the supports and kicked away from the outward edge of the gate. The towers collapsed with a resounding crunch, collapsing vertically and sending a spray of particles sized from pebbles to cinderblocks in a wide arc. Siaran was peppered with a number of the smaller missiles, and one of the larger stone fragments hit a hunter square between the shoulder blades. Shock ran through Siaran's already enervated system; that impact might have killed her, but the hunter ran on without a stumble.

There was no time to waste contrasting her frailty to her companions' robust vitality. Now was a time for appreciating her survival. They stopped a couple hundred yards out from the disintegrating city, scrambled up the high road bank, and watched the rest of the destruction in silence. Siaran gasped in huge lungfuls of the thin, cold air, feeling it burn her throat, the low oxygen levels in the atmosphere too slowly repairing her starved lungs and muscles.

Eventually, the feeling of slow strangulation ebbed. A dust cloud hung over the city, obscuring the heaps of rubble that now lay in place of a stronghold. Numb, Siaran watched it, too glad to be alive to feel remorse yet. Her energy stores were sapped by the long hike to the city, the the battle with the elf-things and especially the hounds, and fleeing from the death trap she'd set in motion.

And she had. She'd been the one to cause all the ruin in front of her. Standing among the six surviving hunters, Siaran hung her head. She'd almost gotten them all killed, picking up that stupid statue from the altar. She wondered if they realized it.

A low growl interrupted her, made her raise her head. Rune stood above her on a slight rise, the eye mesh on his faceplate glowing faintly in the yellow-gray light. Snow whirled around him, hugging close and then spinning away as spiteful cat's-paws of wind drove it gusting across the dead plain. His step was predatory as he moved toward her; she watched him warily, remembering the words he'd spoken up in the tower.

With an apprehensive glance at the five motionless figures with helmeted heads still turned toward the destroyed city, Siaran asked softly, "What did you mean, back there, about 'hunt you'?"

In answer, Rune looked pointedly at Jackal, who was watching them both with his shoulders humped aggressively forward. He made a clicking warble at Rune, a sharp sound that to Siaran seemed accusing. Rune was silent. Jackal gave a single, spitting cough and turned abruptly away with his long locks clacking on his armor. He rejoined the other five, who closed ranks in their now-familiar discussion huddle. After a moment, Rune went to join them. Siaran didn't understand why, but she felt relieved that they moved to make room for him. She was missing something important, she thought.

Suddenly, standing outside the circle, she felt vulnerable and alone and paranoid. Had she guessed right, and they knew she'd pulled the bonehead move that had started the chain-reaction of sound and fury? Were they, right now, talking about whether to kill her? Is that what Rune had meant?

She took an uncertain step back.

The group broke up, its mood shifting fluidly from deep discussion to businesslike resolve. The tall, lean hunter who commanded the only other surviving full team snapped an imperative, but it seemed that they had already decided together what to do. They slid down the embankment and marched up the road, retracing their steps, and it was not Rune this time who turned with an impatient bark to break Siaran's thoughts, but Jackal.

She came down after them, swallowing dryly, relieved. The weird loneliness of the planet must be getting to her; that, and the zombie-like aftereffect of all their encounters in the city. She was pathetically glad that her strange allies did not seem interested in hunting anything else, and hoped that luck would hold, that they were headed back to the ship. She was beyond finding a smooth walking pace and settled for conserving her energy. There was precious little of that; repeated adrenaline surges had left her uncoordinated and weak.

Behind them, the sun rose. At first it was only noticeable because it stained the unsettled dust cloud from gray to copper, casting weak shadows before their feet. Gradually, the sky brightened until the copper sun was burning sullenly behind a bank of thin cloud, tarnishing the plain with the color of dried blood. Unlike sunrise on Earth, this dawn brought with it no feeling of freshness or beginning. Instead, it both sullied and threw into ugly relief the pallor of the land, until Siaran could no longer stand to look at it.

A fragment from some old, forgotten poem rose unbidden to mind: _I sat upon the shore fishing, with the arid plain behind me. Should I at least put my lands in order?_ She couldn't remember the poem—had never had much of a literary turn of mind—but the suggestion of impotence and despair in the fragment reflected perfectly the desolation of her surroundings. She shivered involuntarily, and looked away from a bleakness that, in comparison, made the Gobi look vitally alive. Instead, she looked at the ridges of muscle beneath armor and mesh, yellow flesh speckled with brown, that made up Rune's back, directly in front of her. It was, at least, familiar.

The sun was past its zenith when they climbed the last ridge to the ship's valley. It gave little light and less warmth, and the snow had continued to fall. They were all tired, and as a result, the trip back had taken longer than the trip out. Siaran had repressed a shudder when they had climbed past the three tree-bark women; after her encounter with the idols, she could well imagine the mummies as once-living embodiments of that terrible trinity. Perhaps they were what had killed them, one to each. Her imagination recoiled from the image of intangible forces possessing sentience, and she had hurried past the remains, glad she would not have to see them again.

At least the hike, while endless and agonizing, had been uneventful. Siaran began to shiver now, more from fatigue than anything else. A quick inventory of her physical well-being made her guess she might be at the onset of traumatic shock, the sort experienced by people after being shot or by pregnant women after an intense and painful labor. She tried to still the involuntary quivering in her muscles, but could not. She needed food and sleep; nothing else would replenish her system.

The ship decloaked much like the hunters' own shift suits: massing solid in flashes of blue lightning, made more brilliant in the thin cold air and dim light. Siaran waited as the ramp descended, head down like an old dog, wanting only to stagger inside and rest. Before the ramp had moved more than halfway, Jackal made an alert, commanding noise. Wearily, she raised her head, wondering what could be threatening them in the secluded valley. Surely nothing had made it out of the city alive to follow them. If she had to fight again...

She saw, as she looked up, that Rune had come to stand beside her. There was no hint of fatigue in him; he was alert, almost tense. Ready. Siaran stiffened; her muscles protested at the contraction. The other hunters grouped in a loose circle, heads turned to Jackal.

In the staccato series of growls and chitters that formed the hunters' language, Jackal began to speak. It didn't take long, but the rest of them listened, torsos inclined toward him. Siaran could read their body language well enough: all of them were completely intent by what he was saying. Disturbed, too, from the sudden aggressive hunching of their shoulders.

All of them, that was, except Rune. He alone remained dispassionate, but Siaran could still feel the tension pouring off him like body heat.

When Jackal finished, the other four turned as one to Rune. Siaran's grasp of their facial expressions was sketchy; she relied more on her sense of body positioning, and with the faceplates on, reading their faces was of course impossible. Nevertheless, she read judgment and accusation in them all, and found it suddenly hard to breathe.

The tall, lean leader chattered low, and after a silence, Rune answered him. He gesticulated; he pointed at Siaran, then, snarling, at Jackal.

So, Siaran thought, this was about her interrupted battle with Jackal. Well, if he wanted to resume it, it might be best to just lie down and let him kill her. She was too tired for anything else. She glared bitterly at Jackal, resenting his timing and his inexhaustible energy. He ignored her. His attention, for some inexplicable reason, was bent on Rune. So was everyone else's.

It took Rune even less time to speak his piece than Jackal. He was answered only by the ruthless wind. Then, at last, each hunter turned his head slowly to pin Siaran beneath a metal gaze. She wondered if she was supposed to explain her side of things, inane as that proposition seemed. She took a breath, hesitated, and glanced quickly at Rune. He alone was not looking at her. Some help, she thought. She wasn't even sure where she had erred.

Siaran opened her mouth. Her voice was a dry croak. "I'm not sure what I did wrong, but—"

Rune cut her off with a quick growl. She glared at him.

Silence ensued, long minutes of it, during which Siaran continued to shiver.

Finally, the tall leader stepped forward to stand directly in front of his wayward tribesman and the human female. Siaran looked up into the inhuman, stylized mask. For the first time, she noticed how much longer his corded hair was than that of the others, saw also that it was tinged with gray. More trophies adorned his necklace and belt than any of the other hunters' collections. She'd had little to do with him on the voyage by virtue of team separation, but now she realized that he must be the crew's leader, or captain, or whatever his people called him. Of course, every fighting unit had to have one. The teams had their own leaders, but there had to be someone in command to make decisions when unexpected things happened.

Which, apparently, they had. Somehow, she and Rune had been the cause, or at least the object of blame. She should have killed Jackal, and wondered again why Rune had stopped her spear. Siaran gave him a faint nod, acknowledging his authority but too confused, tired, and scared to do much else.

The tall leader extended his hand to her face. Siaran twitched reflexively as with one claw-tipped finger, he traced the twin curving scars she bore on her forehead. Turning to Rune, he repeated the gesture, following the tribal marks etched into the hunter's faceplate. Then he stepped back, made a sound between a bellow and a snort, and with the same hand made a dismissive sweep across both of them. His claws swung so close to her flesh that Siaran felt the wind of their passage.

The leader gave a single bark of command and turned away. He strode up the broad ramp into the ship's dark belly. Three others went with him. Jackal lingered a moment in an insolent pose, his shoulders thrown back, feet braced apart, hands flexing at his sides. Then he, too, snorted and retreated up the ramp.

Left alone, Siaran looked uncertainly up at Rune. "What...was that about?" she rasped. What she really wanted to ask was whether it was okay to board after their dressing-down. Despite the obvious dismissal, the most overpowering urge she felt was to sleep. She refused to contemplate the possibility that she and Rune would be left here to die. She thought of food, and the high square bed in her sterile bunk.

Rune turned his head inch by slow inch to regard her. Just as slowly, he reached up and detached the pressurized feed from his faceplate, and removed that. Deep green eyes regarded her somberly; the mandibles were folded tightly in on themselves. One twitched occasionally; a sign of agitation, she'd learned.

From within Rune's chest came a great, gusty sigh that rattled through throat and jaw. Siaran felt his breath on her face. His tusks parted, revealing the red-lined inner membrane of his cheek. In his strange gargling whisper, he said, "I shamed my people." He cocked his head in thought; clearly it was difficult for him to form his own phrases instead of imitating hers to clarify his meaning. Siaran waited, her eyes fixed on him, fists clenched. "I...saved him to save usss. All of us." He meant the team, she realized; or possibly the entire band. "From the--" his next word was a garbled snarl, but she knew well enough what he meant.

"From the white hounds," she croaked, and he nodded once, gravely. Her guess had been right, then.

"But," he said, then paused. Siaran wondered if he was hesitant to tell too much to a human, or if it was reluctance to shame himself further. He growled and gave his head a quick shake. "To do that, to stop a...challenge. It is forrrbidden. Now we go back." He waved a hand at the ship. "To your home."

She started to smile at that, relief lighting her wan face, but Rune stopped her with a hand on her head. It was heavy, and the skin of his palm felt rough against her scalp. The palm lifted, became five light pressure points, then just one, moving: his index finger dropped to her forehead to trace her scar, as the leader had. Rather than scour it from his sight, though, Rune lingered. The single point of contact burned between them, eclipsing the copper sun. His eyes burned, too, intense and strangely agonized. Then Rune's hand fell away. He lowered his head and dropped his gaze in the posture of defeat she'd seen before, submissive to a will greater than his own.

"Siarrran. No. They go back to hunt you. To hunt...me."


	16. Pariah

_Note: Much of this chapter is an experiment in character building, with very little that advances the plot. I needed to create a deeper bond between Siaran and Rune as they, uh, hear the sound of inevitability. That's what this chapter attempts to do. Death and dismemberment will continue shortly, that's a promise._

_Thank you all for the continuing love; please bear with me through this chapter's drunken antics. Thanks especially to real-life friends and family who have read this fic and forbore to tease me for writing it.  
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**Chapter 16 – Pariah**

Siaran stared at the bent alien head, trying to make sense of his broken words. Many potential replies flitted through her mind, but she was too shell-shocked to voice any of them. Sarcasm, disbelief, shrewdness, bitterness, and resignation colored these responses; her emotions ran the gamut of the Kübler-Ross five-stage model in a matter of seconds, leaving her feeling more hollow than ever.

In the end, she licked dry lips and asked, "Why?" The question sounded incurious and dead. She hadn't the strength to imbue even a single word with any force.

Rune raised his head slowly to glare at her, mandibles flaring in impatience.

Siaran blinked. "I mean, why me?" she amended. She raised her arms, hands spread. The joints creaked. An echo of her earlier frustration and incomprehension crept into her tone. "I don't get what I did wrong."

Rune sucked in a breath between his fangs. It sounded like a hiss. He flexed his fingers and touched her scar with a light claw. "I…starrrted?" He cocked his head. "I…began…you."

She narrowed her eyes, puzzled, and then her tired brain caught up. "Oh. Because you gave me your tribe's mark."

He nodded. There was misery in the deep-set eyes.

Siaran took a long, unsatisfying breath. The air was cold and thin, and burned her lungs. "So, you're responsible for me, and you broke the warrior code. We both get hunted as a result. Gee, that makes a lot of sense." Despite the sarcasm, her voice shook as she looked at Rune. She'd never seen him like this: placid and quiescent as an old cow, as if all the fight had gone out of him. He looked as hollow as she felt.

The ship's engines began to spin up, the low-power whine that raised gooseflesh on Siaran's skin; for a second, it imitated the pitch of the sonic wave that had smashed the city. The ramp was still down, but just then its hydraulics hissed.

Siaran looked up into the belly of the hold, into the ship that would take her home. No joy lay in that prospect; only a violent death. She looked around at the valley with its scrubby patches of lichen, the washed-out copper smudge in the sky, the infertile earth. They could probably run, but to where? There was nothing to eat, and the air was hard to breathe. She'd not last long and doubted Rune would, either.

She took another deep breath and looked finally at the hunched and silent warrior who towered above her, beside the ship. "They won't...kill us now, if we get on board, will they?"

Rune blew out a gusty sigh and clicked his mandibles impatiently. "No."

"'Course not." Siaran nodded, wearier by the second. "No sport in that, is there?"

Rune didn't answer. He never did, when a question was rhetorical.

Siaran made a face. "Well, Rune, it looks like we have a choice. Go back, and prepare ourselves as much as we can, or run for it now on this crappy planet. Both bad choices, but still. Shall we live a little longer, or die now?"

For a long moment, the hunter was silent. Then he scanned the horizon as Siaran had done before returning his gaze to her. "Live," he said, and the look he gave her had something of the old fire in it.

"Good," she said. Too tired to care about the appearance of propriety, she put her hand on his arm, just above the elbow joint, and leaned some of her weight there. She noticed that iridescent green blood still trickled from his armpit, courtesy of her spear, despite the clotted blue gel smeared liberally on the site. "Let's go, then. We both need to rest."

They limped up the ramp together, and it closed seamlessly behind them.

Siaran wasn't sure what would happen on the long journey back to Earth. She half expected to be thrown into a cell, or at least confined to her quarters under guard. She understood that she and Rune were the closest thing to criminals that his society defined. Knowing the hunters' violent tendencies, she was apprehensive about rough treatment from the moment she stepped back into the loading bay.

It was beyond surprising that she and Rune were left strictly alone. The bay was deserted, and so were the corridors. Apprehension turned to relief, then to puzzlement, but Rune didn't seem surprised in the least. Siaran followed him to the armory, where he silently divested himself of weapons and trappings. Wordlessly, she took up a chamois and helped him polish the gleam back into the metal before he restored it all to the racks and shelves.

As they worked, Siaran was aware of subtle changes in the ship. She felt the thrusters as it lifted from the valley, heard the dim thunder of the powerful drive that broke free of the planet's gravity field, and felt no relief as they left the senile copper sun behind.

Neither of them spoke until they had finished. As they left the armory, she paused and looked back at the ordered displays of shining, deadly things. "Aren't they afraid of letting us free in here?" she asked, giving voice at last to her puzzlement. "I mean, we're kind of convicts now."

To that, also, Rune gave no answer. His next stop was the trophy room, where he silently added the sharp objects he'd taken from the hounds to the collection. From a pocket on his belt, he pulled out two objects and dropped them into Siaran's hand: two white, curved teeth, each more than two inches long, backed by a razor edge. Her brow contracted. "What—"

"Your kills," Rune rumbled, interrupting her.

Siaran stared at the teeth for a long moment, turning them over in the dim light. In the end, she bent and tucked them into her boot. When she straightened up, Rune was watching her with his head to one side.

"I'm not giving them the stuff I earned, if they're just going to turn around and kill me," she told him defiantly.

He grunted noncommittally and stalked out of the room. She followed, dragging feet that felt like lumps of dead meat. She wanted the solace of her own quarters, a long soak in the effervescent yellow fluid, and a longer sleep. They crossed the intersection that led to her bunk, but she kept walking, trailing after Rune. Exhausted she might be, but she was reluctant to be alone, afraid that thoughts of what lay inevitably ahead would overwhelm even her tiredness.

They came to the control room, and there they met an impasse.

Rune strode purposefully toward the broad entrance, paying no attention to his five brothers, all of whom were gathered inside at the control banks, calculating the transcendence from normal to Planck space for the return trip. For their part, they paid an equal lack of attention to Rune, until he reached the threshold. By some unspoken signal all five approached. As one, they turned their backs and stood shoulder to shoulder to block the doorway, unmoving, unresponsive to Rune's surprised-sounding query, then his growls, then his roar of frustration and displeasure.

Siaran watched the whole thing from a few yards away, first in surprise, then horror. Rune was being ostracized, ritualistically shunned; she could see that, draw parallels with human tribes through history that had done the same thing. Always a frightening notion, seeing it in practice was chilling and sad. She tried to speak and couldn't make the sound come; she didn't dare approach Rune, even though her gut told her that the sooner they could leave, the better.

Finally, Rune turned away with a jerk, a violent, uncoordinated movement. Siaran saw his face for an instant and pressed herself against the wall as he passed, giving him as much room as possible. His mandibles were flared wide, his fangs drawn open in a snarl, and his claws flexed and clicked spasmodically. What made her move, and drop her gaze, was the naked suffering in his eyes.

Her heart slammed against her ribcage. The five hunters moved away from the doorway as if nothing had happened, going back to their work. She did not look at them again, but took a few gulps to build her courage and then hurried after Rune.

He wasn't hard to follow, even though she kept well back. Every step was a bone-jarring stomp that even the rubbery coating on the grid floor couldn't muffle.

Her breathing felt hitched and strange as she went, and when she touched her fingers to her face, she found that she was crying. She stopped and swore, the expletive harsh in the deserted corridor, and slammed her fist into a steel bulkhead. The resultant shock of shattering bone made her gasp but cleared her mind. Rune, she was sure, did not deserve any of this. She tried to imagine what he must be feeling. All she could think of was the terrible loneliness and despair she had felt after learning how her parents had died. Barely more than a child, she had been left with an ailing grandparent and the knowledge that day that one's worst nightmares could come true.

While Rune was no child, his circumstances, at least, were not so different than Siaran's had been. That, at least, she could understand. She could give him nothing as a palliative except her company, but it was more than she had had. She took a deep breath, cradled her broken hand in her whole one, and set off again after the faint pounding footsteps.

She turned a corner, blinking away the black spots that swam in her vision, and saw Rune standing near the far end of a long passage inset with unmarked doors. He looked neither right nor left as he palmed the doorplate and stepped out of sight. Marking the door with her eyes, Siaran made her way to it, feeling gray but resolved. She shifted her injured hand to the crook of her elbow and placed her left hand on the control panel. The door opened without a sound.

Beyond was a chamber roughly the same size and shape as hers, with the same inner recess to bathing facilities. This room was not as austere as hers, however. It held a large metal shelf along one wall, and several cases were stacked near the door. The shelves held an assortment of plain cases, some open, the contents of which she could only guess at. Given the hunters' predilections, Siaran thought they might be medical supplies or kits for cleaning weapons or dressing trophies. There were also a few crumpled pieces of cloth, maybe clothing, and a single white cylinder that looked vaguely familiar. Siaran gave it all only a cursory glance; her focus was on the room's occupant.

Rune paused in the act of lowering himself onto his bed, favoring her with a snarl and a displeased hiss. "Get out," he rumbled, as soon as he saw it was her.

"Not a chance." Siaran returned Rune's glare with a flat and level glance. "Now I'm the one in your room, and you've got to deal with me."

The big hunter shrugged and got up again, moving toward her with a single-minded purpose that was all too plain: he meant to throw her out bodily. Siaran wasn't sure what she could do about it, either, but she was determined not to leave him alone after that scene in the control room. Her gaze darted around the room and returned to the shelf, pulled by the white cylinder. What was it she found so familiar? The thing was standing on its end, about 18 inches high by four in diameter. There were markings in black on the tube...oh.

Unexpectedly, she darted around Rune and went to the shelf, crowing in triumph at the top of her rusty voice. Rune was caught flat-footed and and missed his grab for her. He turned wearily to follow the human's inane progress. Did she lack the sense to know when to leave him alone?

"This is _mine!_" she shrieked now with manic glee, making his head hurt. She seized the cardboard cylinder with her left hand, brandishing it from across the room and skipping. Rune wondered if the stresses of the past hour had affected her sanity. He found the varied and mercurial range of human emotions difficult to follow at the best of times, and he was far from his best right now. They were in a situation that with every breath was growing worse, yet his dubious protégée, contrary to all sense, appeared happy.

"I knew it was you who took my stuff, you bastard!" Siaran's eyes darted over the rumpled pieces of cloth on the shelf. She was gloating now, he thought. "Bet these are my clothes, too." She shrugged. "Don't care about them anymore. But this," she hugged the white tube one-armed, "This is _good_. Oh Rune, you're a naughty boy, but at least you saved it."

Rune stared at her, snarling in irritation. Siaran knew he wanted her out and was fast losing patience with her, and she didn't care. A drink. That was exactly what she needed, a little fire in the veins and cheer in her tongue. Rune, too. She didn't drink alcohol as a rule except on special occasions, but they could both use some liquid courage right about now. Could they ever.

She skipped around to the far side of the bed as Rune again converged on her, keeping out of his reach. Without thinking, she held the tube tight in the crook of her left arm and pried at the inset plastic lid with the fingers of her right hand.

She gasped, and the canister dropped to the bed with a soft thump. "Ahhh..._fuck._" She could hardly whisper the word. The exuberance drained out of her along with the color in her face. Biting her lips, she slid down the wall to her haunches, bowed over her hand as the tiny shattered bones screamed inside her skin. The dim room was growing dark and she leaned her head back against the wall, willing herself to stay conscious.

It wasn't her blacking out, though. It was a shadow. Rune stood above her, squeezed into the two feet of space between the bed and the wall, his eyes moving from her face to the swelling skin on her right knuckles.

"Broke my fuckin' hand, coach," she managed weakly. Rune merely grunted in a resigned way and reached down to help her up. Siaran sat on the edge of the bed and felt gray.

"Dumbassss," he hissed, in a fair approximation of her sarcastic tone. Siaran's lips curved tremulously.

"Too right. Can you fix it?"

He nodded, got up, rummaged on the shelf, and came back with a metal box. Siaran looked at it with a discernible lack of enthusiasm. "What's that?"

Rune thought. "Plassterrr," he said at last. "Musst ssset bone firrrst. Then," He gripped the back of one hand with the other, giving it a shake to show bracing, firmness. "Heal fasst." He reached for her hand.

"Oh no," said Siaran, and shook her head to emphasize her point. "I want this to be as painless as possible. No point in stoicism if we're about to be hunted to death." She pointed to the white canister where it lay on the bed. "Open that."

Rune stared at her for so long that she wondered if he'd refuse. In the end, he rattled his tusks, reached for the canister, and pried the lid off delicately with one black claw. Upending the tube, he caught the neck of the slick green bottle as it slid out, and Siaran smiled with relief. It was full.

The bottle had a simple white label inscribed in black. Austere and unexciting, but the makers of this product did not need fancy advertising. She made unscrewing motions with her hand, unable to take her eyes off the familiar link to Earth and all the good things it could produce. Rune studied the bottle, then took careful hold of the small metal cap in his massive hand and removed it with an effortless twist.

The smell hit the air at once and made Siaran's mouth water. It left no doubt that the bottle's contents were exactly what the label described.

_Laphroaig_, it read. It had been Siaran's father's favorite drink, a strong, smoky Scotch. She had intended to drink this bottle with some of her fellow black belts, good friends, if she medaled at the Worlds. A private and silent toast to her dad, proof of accomplishment and overcoming. It had disappeared from her pack along with all her other non-essentials that first day on board the hunter ship, and here it was now, miraculously unopened.

She widened her smile to include Rune. "You want to try it?" she asked.

He extended the bottle to her. "You firrsst." He pointed to her hand.

How bizarre, she thought as she took the bottle, to contemplate getting drunk with Rune. And drunk was what she intended to get. She might not have another chance, after all. What the hell.

She lifted the bottle to her lips and took three long, burning swallows of smoky golden fire. Her breath caught, and she coughed, covering her mouth with her wrist and closing her burning eyes. She was lighter and leaner than was typical for her, and she hadn't so much as sipped a beer in what probably amounted to months. Her tolerance was low from stress, and from recent lack of food and sleep. The Scotch was going to mess her up good, no doubt about it. Tomorrow was going to suck.

She didn't care.

She kept hold of the bottle while Rune completed the repair job with brisk efficiency, snapping the knuckles into place and stretching the hand straight to align the broken metacarpals. It hurt, but the Scotch was at work in her belly and bloodstream, which made it easy to concentrate on the warmth and looseness spreading through limb and joint instead of the pain. She hardly felt it when the predator cracked a seal on the plaster to activate its chemical heat and poured the blistering, waxlike substance across her hand, sealing it into castlike immobility with next to no bulk. Then, as she raised the bottle to him in a silent toast, he pried it away from her.

"Thanks," she whispered.

He watched her expressionlessly, nails tapping an agitated rhythm on the glass. "Why...did you follow?" he asked in his grating whisper.

She shrugged. "What else was there t'do?" She was already a little thick-tongued, though still in command of herself. She wondered how long that would last.

He continued to study her. Siaran sighed and pulled herself up straight, tucking her legs beneath her on the bed. "Rune, I'd change things if I could. But I can't, and neither can you." Instinctively, she didn't apologize, though she might have to a human in his situation. "What we _can_ do is fight them, and try to win."

He growled. "Can't win."

She raised her eyebrows. "No? Well, maybe not. Maybe, when this ship lands on Earth, we just walk down the ramp and stand there while they kill us. Why fight, if it's a foregone conclusion?" She heaved a melodramatic sigh and reached for the bottle he hadn't yet touched. "Gimme that. Maybe I can just drink myself to death right now."

Rune stood, snatching the green bottle out of her reach. Siaran set her mouth into a hard line. "Outside the ship, you told me you wanted to live. So, live."

He peeled back his mandibles as if in pain, but at least the great head didn't drop in defeat. "My tribe..." he didn't finish.

"Yeah. Your tribe shunned you. Sucks, doesn't it? Guess I'm your tribe now. Lucky you." She rolled her eyes.

Rune stared at her, then gave a short bark of disbelief, followed by a chitter that might have been laughter. He raised the bottle's skinny neck and set his mandibles around it with a quadruple click. He poured a few ounces of the human-made liquor down his throat, removed the bottle, and rumbled in pleased surprise. There was something he wouldn't have thought possible: a sentient prey species manufacturing drink strong enough to be on par with yautja _c'ntlip_.

"Atta boy," Siaran murmured. "Not bad for humans, huh?"

Rune took another swig and handed the bottle back.

"Not bad," he agreed.

Uncounted hours later, Siaran woke up with a throbbing head and a faint sense of foolishness. She opened crusty eyes and discovered that her best efforts to return to her quarters had met with little success. She lay on her belly a few feet from Rune's door. An attempt to sit up brought a wave of nausea, so she settled for rolling onto her back and surveying the wreckage from ground level.

The wreckage consisted of one very large, sprawled, unconscious, reptilian humanoid. He had, to all appearances, slid from the bed in a heap; one foot was still caught in the tumbled fur. The rest of him was a graceless hulk of sprawled limbs, dusky skin, and tangles of long cordlike hair. Now and then, the mandibular jaws twitched. Otherwise, his breathing was heavy and slow, redolent of the Scotch; he'd drunk most of the bottle. Six fingers' worth had been enough to induce near-catatonia in Siaran, but she'd insisted none of it go to waste and he had taken her at her word.

She thought she remembered fragments of conversation: her describing her childhood, of all things, to Rune—the summers spent in Africa, playing with the other doctors' kids and with the native children in the bush, until the night her parents disappeared. Her decision to await word from them at the embassy, her arrival timed with that of the gory package from Mugabe's forces.

She thought that Rune had spoken in his own language after that, and she might have tried to imitate all the growls and clicks until her throat was sore. Then she had laughed until her belly hurt, and he had laughed, and they had been companionably, warmly drunk.

She _thought_ she had touched his face, exploring with bold drunken fingers the ugly features so different from her own: the broad knobby cranium, the thick supple cords of braided hair, the bone and tendon of those weird mandibles. He'd been as patient beneath her touch as if she were a child. In the absence of inhibition, she'd given in to curiosity.

Oh, _god_.

Then he had reclined on the bed and closed his eyes, and after a minute of woozy internal conflict, she had staggered to her feet and stumbled purposefully to the door. Hadn't made it far, obviously.

She lay on the floor, feeling wretched and embarrassed. When the wave of dizziness passed, she tried again, and this time made it to her feet. "Hope you wake up better than I did," she muttered to the inert hunter. She reached for the imprint plate. A hand snagged her ankle and brought her crashing to the floor again. Landing on her injured hand, she swore, then groaned.

"Don't...leave."

"Rune." Clutching her throbbing hand, Siaran rolled onto her back again and kicked at him to dislodge his grip. "I gotta. I feel terrible."

He let go and raised himself to all fours to regard her out of eyes rimmed more in red than black; the deep socket tissues were inflamed. Was that a sign of hangover? When he said nothing more, she added lamely, "Look. I have to get food, and sleep somewhere more comfortable than your floor." She paused. "Though it was a nice floor and welcome at the time." She scooted closer to him, until she could smell the alcohol on his breath. "I'm with you until the end. Okay? I'm not going anywhere. Just to bed."

He regarded her steadily. "You ssstink," he finally said. "Go."

Siaran blinked, then got to her feet. "Look who's talking, roadkill breath," she shot back, and palmed the plate. The warm air of the corridor wafted past her as she stepped into it.

As she marched away as resolutely as her hangover allowed, she heard his voice again. "We trrain laterrr. I will find you."

"Just what I need," she muttered. But she had eaten, rested, and was ready when he arrived. That first sparring session introduced a new aspect to her training. Rune began to teach her to identify simple growls and trills, field calls that he made up, disparate from what the others already knew. There was a call to come together, to circle right or left, a call of warning, calls for help, commands to run.

Siaran applied herself diligently to this new task, and made suggestions of her own. They did not know how the hunt would play out; Rune could only guess, given his people's preferences, what his tribe-brothers might do. He listened to her suggestions, and sometimes incorporated them.

With a definite purpose in mind and without the distractions provided by Jackal on the outbound trip, Siaran found that she learned much faster with the focus between just her and Rune. Her hand healed with surprising quickness. She memorized and practiced Rune's calls, and her shaky confidence began to grow stronger. She had to be able to identify and seize any chance they were given, however slight, and was determined to do so.

Once, Rune asked her how humans would try to kill his kind if they saw them. "Many," he said, and she guessed he meant if they saw all five of his surviving brothers together.

"Short of a nuke," she smirked, "They'd probably go for overwhelming force of numbers and arms. Humans feel better if they can attack in force. We know we're too vulnerable alone, especially to things that look like you."

"Then," said Rune slowly, "We hope forr a hunt among numberrss."

She cocked her head, puzzled, unconsciously imitating his own much-used gesture.

"Alwayss a betterrr hunt if therrre iss fighting," he explained.

"So, we hope they land us in Afghanistan. Wonderful. Rune, that would be just as bad for us as for them." But she was able to laugh, and it felt good to laugh again.

Something had changed between them over that bottle of Scotch, she thought. They were closer now, though probably more by virtue of necessity than any lasting effects of alcohol-induced camaraderie. They'd see this thing to the end, however bitter it might be. To increase their unlikely chances of survival, and because there was nothing else to do short of plunging into black despair, she set herself to learning and preparing as much as she could with what they were given. And that was a lot—too much to be incidental.

They had unrestricted access to the armory, the training hall, and the trophy room. These places were empty whenever the two of them visited, which made Siaran sure that they were being encouraged to prepare as much as possible. Rune agreed with disturbing calm. It would be a better hunt that way, he explained again. He grew almost fatalistic—determined to put up a fight, but certain of the outcome.

As he knew his people a lot better than she did, Siaran found Rune's attitude chilling. It was one thing to stare down death when she was in the moment, but during the long voyage toward Earth, she couldn't hold onto that kind of grim resolve for long. Five against two was never betting odds, made worse by the the fact that one of the two had the bad luck to be a frail human. She remembered watching Rune and Jackal spar; neither of them had been able to get the upper hand. Add four more against them...

Many times, she went to bed beyond exhausted, only to wake from vivid dreams of Jackal's wristblades punching through her sternum, spraying out bone and blood and life.

The thought that they were playing right into their antagonists' plans did nothing to ease her fears, but Siaran could see no better choice than their current plan to train hard and go on living as long as possible. It just didn't look as if, once the hunt began, that would be very long.


	17. Heart of Darkness

**Chapter 17 – Heart of Darkness**

Despite the frightening prospect of being hunted, and the ship's faster-than-light progress toward that hunt, time seemed suspended. On the outbound journey, Siaran had been full of anticipation, awe, and determination to learn. That voyage had gone quickly. Now, though her focus was probably more intense given her acute awareness of what awaited their return, the dim-dark cycles seemed endless. Without even a viewscreen devoid of stars to look at, it seemed the ship plodded through the cold distances of space without going anywhere.

She did not prepare for death. Every time she thought to try, anger and injustice surged up from the depths and made it impossible to achieve the calm, detached state of mind she needed to contemplate and accept the end of her life. She did not fully understand the complexity behind Rune's betrayal and her involvement in it, and Rune had not been able to explain it in terms she could understand. Siaran was certain of one thing only: that she would die fighting.

The day the ship decelerated out of tachyon drive and expanded back into normal space, this resolve was tested. She was padding along a stretch of corridor, on her way to the training hall for yet another punishing round of sparring with Rune. She paused when she first felt, then heard the change in the ship's engines. She rested one hand against the bulkhead and a moment later felt that strange reverse pressure below her navel. She was almost home.

Suddenly, the interminable time that had passed since leaving the planet of the copper star seemed to have gone much too quickly.

The sensation lessened, leaving her a little queasy. Siaran swallowed a couple of times, her throat muscles working audibly. Her hand dropped to her side and she simply stood, unable for the moment to bear contemplating what reentering her own solar system meant.

Jackal stepped out of the intersecting passage just ahead and stood blocking her way. Half in shadow, filling the corridor, he looked too much like the harbinger of death.

Siaran felt the saliva leave her mouth and her heart rate triple. She stared at Jackal's ugly face with narrowed eyes, letting her anger rush over and cover her surprise. This was the first time since they had left the dying planet that anyone but Rune had acknowledged her existence. Just her luck that it would be Jackal who broke the habit.

The predator gazed back at her out of unreadable orange eyes, then moved swiftly toward her. Siaran had spent months learning to anticipate the hunters' superior reflexes and saw him coming, but the confines of the passage made it hard to do much more than tense in anticipation of a blow.

Jackal lifted her by the throat and slammed her against the black metal wall. He left her room to breathe, but the sensation was still one of strangulation: all her weight was suspended from her neck just below the chin. Siaran's upper lip curled back from her teeth. "Trying to cut down the odds?" she choked out.

Jackal watched her, features immobile except for one upper mandible, which twitched in rhythmic irritation. Slowly, he tightened his fingers around her throat.

Maybe he _was _trying to cut down the odds, Siaran thought in a surge of panic. It would be such a small thing to squeeze until those claws cut through skin and tendon, into vein and artery. Life bubbles so close beneath the skin in a human throat. She fought down the panic with all the bitterness and cold fury she possessed, willing herself to breathe as slowly, to take in as much air as he allowed her.

Jackal growled softly and pushed his face up until it nearly touched hers. His mandibles parted, revealing a double row of long canine teeth. "Arrre you afrrraid?"

It was the first time he'd spoken to her in her own language. His voice was similar to Rune's, but sharper and more raspy.

Afraid? She was terrified. And she was _not _going to give him the satisfaction of seeing that.

She didn't answer, merely poured what she hoped was fury into her glare, and kept her eyes on his.

With an amused-sounding snort, Jackal dropped her. Siaran's legs didn't catch her in time and she crashed awkwardly to the ground. She staggered to her feet and coughed. With one hand, Jackal pinned her against the wall again, this time with fingers splayed in the center of her chest.

"You...sssmell afrrraid." Jackal continued to contemplate the small, defiant creature. He could feel the spongy resilience of the puny ribcage, and the hot heart that stuttered its tattoo of fear beneath. Why did she not admit to her fear? She was only a female; worse, she was human. She could not possibly understand the warrior code of honor, despite his excoriated colleague's defense of her.

He snorted again. Rune was wrong to place his faith in such a one, and he would prove it now.

Choosing his words with care, for the human language was full of wasted syllables and empty meaning, Jackal offered Siaran a way out.

"You can sstill claim glorrry with the trrribe. You do not need to die in the Hunt."

There was no denying the hope that came into her face, even though wariness quickly occluded it. Jackal clicked his tusks together. Though it made his flesh crawl, he touched an index finger to the mark on Siaran's forehead, the mark the betrayer had given her, the mark she did not deserve.

Yet she had it.

"Take back honorrr. Hunt with usss."

Alertly, she said, "That's all?"

Jackal nodded.

Siaran took a quick breath. "Hunt with you. Hunt what, exactly?"

Jackal growled, a low and savage sound of contempt. "Hunt the betrrrayerrr."

"You mean Rune."

Another nod; another growl, louder this time.

Siaran's lips twitched. "Did you make him the same offer?"

The claws splayed on her chest curled inward, drawing five points of blood beneath her running top. "That is forrrbidden. His honorr isss losst."

She hesitated, thinking. "Let me get this straight. All I have to do is help you kill Rune, and I'm free to go? You won't come after me?"

"You will have the glorrry of the Hunt. The trrribe will honor that."

Siaran's gaze slid briefly away from Jackal's face, then back to it again. Her eyes held torment.

He waited. She took another, longer breath. He felt her relax as she came to a decision, and drew his claws out of her skin.

Slowly, Siaran raised her hand. She made an odd-shaped fist, with the knuckles facing him and the longest middle digit extended straight up. He cocked his head appraisingly at this new gesture.

"There's my answer, you son of a bitch," she whispered. "When the hunt starts, the first thing I try to kill will be you. Now _get out of my way_."

For a second, Siaran thought he was going to kill her anyway. He uttered a coughing roar of surprise and flexed the claws back into the painful gouges he'd already made. His whole body was tense with outrage. Then, abruptly, he withdrew and was gone along the corridors, fading into the darkness, and she was alone with her trembling bravado.

"That was stupid," she whispered, and wasn't sure whether she meant Jackal or herself.

When she'd gathered her wits together enough to stop shaking, she continued to the training area. Rune was waiting for her, and she told him about her unexpected meeting with Jackal. He listened without interruption. When she'd finished, she watched him nervously, wondering whether this would be the final straw and he would now fly into a rage, take over the ship by main force, and crash it into one of Neptune's moons, maybe. She should have just kept her mouth shut.

Instead, Rune purred with laughter. "I am glad we go to fight togetherrr," he said. He would not be drawn into further conversation, but insisted that they work on grapples and throws.

Four days later, it began.

The ship cloaked and dropped first into low-Earth orbit, then punched through the atmosphere at a shallow angle and descended with thrusters on full. The five hunters herded Rune and Siaran into the armory. Rune was silent as he claimed his armor and habitual weapons. When his captors dispassionately removed the wrist-unit that controlled, among other things, the invisibility shift on his suit, he bore it without reaction. Siaran took her cue from him and stoically received the dagger and short sword—the familiar weapons she'd used before. Besides the weapons, she wore only her tank suit, black canvas pants, and hiking boots. Jackal had destroyed her shirt, and her _do bohk_ had been slashed to ribbons by the hounds.

They were made to stand near the door, under guard, while the rest of the hunters took turns outfitting themselves. Each of them seemed to take a malicious pleasure in activating his shift suit in front of the captives, flicking into nonexistence and then back again with crackles of electric blue.

Siaran gritted her teeth. She knew what they were doing. Humans, it seemed, weren't the only intelligent beings capable of psyching out opponents.

When that was finished, Siaran and Rune were taken to the loading bay. Two of the hunters walked in front of them, three behind. They did not speak. Since the incident in the control room, Rune had never again subjected his dignity to the conditions of his exile, and Siaran was relieved to see that he was not about to now. If he broke, she didn't think she had the strength to stand alone. Especially not considering that the whole ordeal felt uncomfortably like being marched to their execution.

Which, if she thought rationally about it, they were.

She decided that thinking rationally was overrated.

The loading bay held a number of tall, shallow niches in its convex wall. Siaran had noticed these before, but never given them more than cursory inspection or thought. They had simply been more parts of the ship that were beyond her understanding. Now, as they approached the niches, she saw that they were occupied by tall, torpedolike cylinders, dully glinting an unremarkable gray.

Someone activated a control, and linear cracks appeared on the surface of two of the cylinders. The cracks formed a geometric rectangle, which then swung outward to reveal a dark space within. Siaran was reminded forcibly of a coffin. She resisted as she was pushed toward the dark interior of the left-hand torpedo, setting her heels uselessly against the hunters' weight, her eyes wide, until Rune's low bark of warning interrupted her. She glanced quickly at him; his green eyes were intense and calm, and as she watched he walked unperturbed into the other cylinder, which the hunters sealed around him.

The notion of shooting fish in a barrel flitted through Siaran's mind as she allowed herself to be pushed into her torpedo. The door shut, sealing off sight and sound so completely that she might as well be in a sensory deprivation tank. Then a pressurized hiss filled the small interior, and suddenly she was squeezed, gently but relentlessly, but a warm, styrofoam-like substance that filled all the spaces she did not, fitting snugly around her body.

For a few seconds, after that, nothing happened. Siaran waited in the dark, wondering if she'd suffocate to death in the foam and that would be the end of it. A muffled explosion rattled her capsule. After that came an abrupt sensation of weightlessness, which was weird at first because the foam cushioned her so tightly that she was only aware of the free-fall by the sensation in her stomach. A few seconds passed in silence. Then, incongruous and terrifying, she felt herself falling, accelerating rapidly until she no longer knew which way was up. All she could feel was the drag on her skin and bones as the acceleration increased to the point of agony. The drop lasted all the eternity of half a minute. She thought she screamed.

The deceleration shock was so great that Siaran's breath left her lungs in a whoosh, even packed inside the foam. The impact of landing, a few seconds later, was mild by comparison. She was not even sure she had stopped moving at all until the cylinder door cracked open once more and Rune reached in to pull her out. She was upside down and rolled shakily to her feet, hanging gratefully onto his arm.

The first thing she noticed was that it was night. Looking up, she could see stars in the sky that looked unfamiliar. But the smells, the sounds—damp earth, tree leaves, the pungence of rotting vegetation mixed with loam, the rhythmic creaking hum of nocturnal insects—they were all so beautifully, despairingly familiar that Siaran's throat closed with the ache of it. She was home.

Rune let go of her and moved off a pace or two, standing alertly. They were in a small clearing, she saw; all around them was the dense blackness of trees. The air was warm and humid, and smelled of damp leaves and something else more acrid. Siaran inhaled, stretching every sense. Smoke...and underlying that, the stink of latrines. The moon was beginning to rise above them, full or nearly so, but the trees were so high that it illuminated nothing that could have made those unmistakably human smells.

For the moment, at least, they were alone. The other five hunters had not dropped in pods behind them; they must mean to land the ship and then begin tracking them. They were in no hurry, and probably wanted the game to be as much of a challenge as possible.

This dismal train of thought was interrupted when the screaming started. Siaran sucked in a breath and went swiftly to stand by Rune, who was looking along to the direction of the moonrise. He had donned his faceplate, and the eyes gleamed eerily down at her, greeny-blue.

"Think it's them?" Siaran whispered, barely audible.

"No. They would come for usss firrrst unless attacked. Not oomansss." He tilted his head meaningfully, and Siaran nodded. There was no sound of gunfire that would likely herald a human reaction to the presence of armored, dreadlocked, eight-foot-tall aliens. Just intermittent screams, now interspersed by coarser shouts.

"Let's check it out. You said you wanted a fight in a population."

Rune nodded once, and together they left the clearing. Siaran's heart was beating high; but whether in excitement or fear was hard to discern. Certainly she was afraid, but at the same time, the long waiting was over. Bleak though the odds looked, she had trained for this and intended it to be the finest battle of her life, even though it came at the end of it.

She crept behind Rune through damp undergrowth. Their progress was slowed a little by the dense vegetation and hanging vines. Wherever they were, it wasn't in Siaran's native country. Too wet, too warm. This was a jungle of some kind; maybe South America. She delighted in her ability to move soundlessly, and even the tangled vines were no more than obstacles to be nimbly overcome. Physically, at least, she had come a long way as a hunter. Now, all she had to do was hold it together mentally. She hadn't forgotten her promise to kill Jackal.

They didn't have far to go before they reached the source of the screams. Another clearing, this one larger and obviously man-made, opened before them. Siaran and Rune paused in the shadow of the jungle and looked out at a small settlement.

A few clapboard houses, little more than huts, huddled together in the middle of a broad, muddy expanse of bare ground. A stream trickled out of the jungle just above where they stood and wound its way through the settlement, no doubt bearing what might once have been fresh water. Now it was heavily polluted, to judge by the smell rising from it. Electric lights shone at intervals: naked bulbs strung between the houses. The houses ringed a small open area that held a common hearth and some ragged fencing where a few chickens milled; a gathering place for the villagers. A bonfire had been lit there. Siaran squinted at it, noting something wrong besides the screams. It looked as if most of the things that fueled the bonfire were chairs and books.

The bulbs and the firelight shone on the weathered and gapped wood of the ill-built huts. They shone on furtive, hurrying figures, throwing long shadows as people ran and shouted. They shone on the uniforms of four soldiers as they came suddenly out of the nearest house, half-dragging a terrified woman between them. The light reflected the whites of their eyes, and their faces were black. The soldiers wore fatigues and berets, and the woman was clad neck to toe in a long linen shift. Her feet were bare. She wailed, praying and begging, and Siaran went cold when she realized she could understand some of her words.

She was praying in Shona.

Siaran fell to her knees. Pungent mud soaked through her canvas pants at once, but she didn't feel it. She didn't feel anything. With her eyes, she saw the soldiers drag the woman into the town square, bend her over the fence, and pull off her shift. One of them began to rape her while the others closed around, watching and waiting. Siaran heard her screams, their rough laughter and brutal threats; she heard Rune growl and shift restlessly beside her. But her mind was occupied with a greater horror than what was before her. It left her kneeling on the wet earth as helpless as she'd been when the hounds attacked.

She made a noise in her throat, a strangled, retching sound, and whispered, "No."

Rune growled a query, and with a great effort, Siaran raised her head and looked at him. Her mouth was slack and her eyes were hollow. Her hands clutched futilely, squeezing mud between her fingers. When she was finally able to make the words come, her voice shook.

"Rune." She struggled to pull it together against the images that invaded her head. The impact of knowing, with terrible finality, where they had landed was more than she could stand just then. Her parents had died here. People were dying in the village. And she would die here; the last place on the planet she wanted to die. In a despairing whisper, she said, "We're in Zimbabwe."


	18. Hammer and Anvil

**Chapter 18 – Hammer and Anvil**

_Note: The delay in delivering this chapter is inexcusable. It was technically the most difficult to write so far, and I learned the incongruous lesson that writing realistic battle scenes is much easier in a fantasy setting than in a conjectured area of the real world. There were many pieces to direct, and I also learned that I never want to be a general, and why I'm such a bad chess player. I hope to have the next chapter posted in a much shorter time._

_I owe this chapter's completion to someone I know only as Jamez, who will probably never read it. Nevertheless, he gave me a crucial answer when I asked how one can survive a trap when the jaws snap closed, and his solution is the one I used._

_Thank you to everyone who continues to read and review. This thing has gotten so long that I'm writing it as much for your sake now as for mine, in hopes that together we will all have enough impetus on my psyche to see it to the end. Thank you also to Adam, who showed me how to make the whole story better when I couldn't quite see it myself but knew there was something else I wanted to do with it. One day I may go back for a rewrite._

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Rune could make no sense of Siaran's words, though he understood her physical reaction well enough. The geopolitical landscape of her planet held neither interest nor importance for him. What was important was that she was kneeling in the mud, in sight of any human who might glance this way. She could not have forgotten all he'd taught her of keeping silent and out of sight; that alone would have cued him that something was wrong, even if he couldn't read the shock in her fixed stare and fear in her shallow rapid breathing and the sweet-iron stink of her as adrenaline kicked the perspiration up a notch.

That she should fear when she wasn't directly threatened puzzled him. Neither of them had the luxury of uncertainty; somewhere in the night, the hunt had begun. Even to his filtered sight, Siaran's body heat reading was escalating by the second, and something had to be done about that and about her inexplicable paralysis. Rune uttered the click-growl that he'd taught her meant _freeze_, and shoved her, face down, into the mud.

Siaran had time to do no more than blink as the innate response of Rune's command broke one psychological lock for another. She felt his hand between her shoulder blades pitch her suddenly forward. Training saved her a broken nose; she turned her head sideways just before she hit the mud with a soft squelch. She got her limbs under her and pushed upright, but Rune's weight came down again and if she'd protested, she'd have gotten a mouthful of slime. He turned her over roughly, did it again, and she shut her eyes and felt mud cold on her skin, clogging her ears, caking in the webbing between her fingers.

When Rune let her up, she backed hastily into the cover of the trees, blew mud out of her nostrils, and flicked the excess from her hands. She drew one angry breath, but Rune stopped her with a hiss of warning. Siaran shut her mouth, but her expression was mutinous; she was well aware that the soldiers in the village had rifles, and hadn't intended to speak above a whisper.

So she vented her frustration by punching the hunter as hard as she could on the upper arm, just below his shoulder armor. He turned to look at her, crouched above her in the night, and made a brief, soft clatter of amusement behind the inscrutable faceplate. He touched her mud-dark face lightly with the tips of his claws, almost a caress: he forgave her, and welcomed her back to the here and now.

And quite rightly, she thought with sudden chagrin. Being stunned to immobility wouldn't help her survive. The best she could do was concentrate on the present, and exist without the trappings of emotional distress brought on by memory of the past or contemplation of the future. She must be alive and desperate to live, feeling self only as bone and muscle, a hunger to be fed, a fear to be endured.

Siaran was pretty sure that was Rune's internal state all the time. If she couldn't imitate it now, she would put them both into even more danger.

Beyond the cover of the trees, horrible things went on being done. More screaming punctuated the night air; more shouts. Rifle fire cut through the human noise, a single shot, shockingly loud. The orange flicker of the bonfire grew brighter. Men's voices cursed in Shona, and feminine sobbing came faint but clear, repeating a single word in desperation but without hope: "_Batsira. Batsira._" Help.

She couldn't be what Rune was.

Siaran's lips drew involuntarily back to expose her teeth. In a hollow murmur, rounding the consonants to reduce the chance that their hissing would be overheard, she said, "We have to help them."

Rune growled a negative; his corded hair lifted and swung as he emphasized the growl with a shake of his head. Siaran snarled, forgetting for a moment the need to be silent; her whisper was vehement. "Goddammit, Rune. You plan to kill your own kind for hunting you." A mud-caked finger stabbed in the direction of the light and sound. "Those are humans being tortured by their own kind. _My_ kind. I can't sit here and do _nothing_."

He saw her muscles bunch and reached to stop her, but she was gone like a shot across the muddy expanse, crouched low and hurrying to the shelter of the nearest house, a dark bulk forty meters away. There was mud and bits of her skin beneath his talons; she'd squirmed from his grip, slippery as an eel with the mud on her.

Rune cursed once, quietly, in his own tongue. If they started killing the humans in the village, the sound would attract the attention of the warriors who would even now be quartering the jungle to look for them. Siaran had either forgotten this, or didn't care; a strange, dark, vaulting mood was on her, the sort of mood that made heroes and dead warriors amongst his own people.

But they weren't his people anymore.

For a fraction of a second, he considered leaving her there, to chase her folly to its end. He discarded the idea almost at once. There was a time to teach his stubborn pupil a lesson; this was not it. Deserting her would not only be dishonorable, it would be foolish. They had prepared for the hunt together and they would face it together. As small as both their chances were of surviving it, they were reduced even further if they became separated.

A few seconds later, he rose and moved across the muddy clearing, a tall powerful shadow gliding through the night with the silent grace of a hunting animal.

Siaran felt Rune press lightly against her, and a fierce and reckless joy rose in her that she didn't want to tamp down. They crouched in the dark behind thin wooden walls while the sounds of soldiers terrorizing a small population in the name of power and control filled the night. Heat flooded Siaran's mouth, and realized she was very close to running straight out into the square with no plan beyond sheer fury.

Rune must have read her responses, too, for he set both hands heavily on her shoulders and pressed down until her spine felt the strain of the extra weight and she sank to her haunches. She put her head back and took several breaths, each one less shaky, until the heat left her face and mind and she could think clearly again.

Through the mud, Rune's faceplate was only hard against her cheek, not cold. "You arre rready for thiss?" His voice was nearly inaudible; Siaran felt the vibrations against her skin. She nodded.

The double click he made then meant "watch," and after another moment of struggle to master her impulses, Siaran did just that. Rune released her and she edged to the corner to peer out into the village square. The soldiers were loose and unconcerned, most of them grouped in little clusters around women. A few others went into and out of the houses, bringing books and pamphlets, waving these in the faces of the villagers and shouting, then tossing them onto the blaze. There were fifteen or sixteen, all armed; Siaran couldn't be sure of an exact count. A muddy track led into the settlement from the east. Parked along this, a dozen or so yards from the houses, were three or four battered Land Rovers with military insignia painted on the hoods.

The soldiers moved without hurrying, enjoying the shouting and the power they had over the terrified people. They had done this countless times before, and were confident and practiced in these rituals, certain of success in their mission. With all the might of their government behind them, they had nothing to fear.

Siaran watched with eyes that had learned to see differently since they'd last looked at any earthly thing. She calculated distances and numbers, cover and tactics, and saw what could be done. Rune, she knew, was doing the same thing; probably more swiftly. He caught her shoulder to get her attention and pointed: there, and there. She nodded once, seeing as he had taught her to see: gaze constantly roving, never looking at an object but beyond it, merely sensing whether and in what direction it moved. The adrenaline was pumping again, but she had better control now, even though her mouth was still dry from the bitter salt of hate.

As she rose on Rune's command, she wondered fleetingly whether, having battled with monsters, she had now become one. She had every intention of killing the soldiers, the brothers in arms of the men who had slaughtered her parents. What sort of person did that make her? She didn't care; the question was too easily answered by another: what sort of person would casually terrorize and murder his unarmed countrymen and still be able to sleep at night?

She took one step forward and found herself airborne suddenly, lifted and tossed, briefly weightless at the apex. Rune had thrown her expertly, and though surprised she recovered swiftly in the air, bending her joints and landing softly on the near-horizontal roof of the house. The hunter was beside her a second later. He jumped higher than he'd thrown her but landed even more softly. The significance wasn't lost on Siaran. Rune was reminding her, by action alone, that he was still the premier hunter and that she had better follow his lead, no matter how righteous her fury.

Her wounded pride allowed her a moment's vindictive pleasure as she imagined Rune's weight shattering the roof's substandard timbers and sending him crashing through into the house below. Then Rune drew one of the throwing discs from his belt and flicked it open. The curved blades extended, sharp and silver in the moonlight.

Siaran dropped to her belly and crawled up the shallow angle of the roof to its peak. Cautiously, she peered over the other side. Nobody looked up to see her head there on the roof in the bright night. People almost never look up, especially when everything interesting that's happening is doing so on the ground.

The bonfire blazed high, occasionally sending up crackling sparks that came close to the adjacent house, the largest. That was to her right. Directly opposite were the muddy double track and the parked vehicles. Below her perch was the common brick hearth, encircled by the trampled mud of the village square. The flock of frightened, thoroughly cowed villagers was wedged between the house on Siaran's left and the chicken pen. A single soldier leaned on the butt of his rifle, looking them over with casual arrogance. She'd counted three small knots of red berets before, and her new vantage point let her see their positions better: two on the lean-to porch that fronted the house next to the fire, and one at the hearth.

The fire crackled greedily, the women cried or begged, the soldiers shouted and laughed. The stink of open latrines rose from somewhere close below, overpowering the smell of the jungle, the smoke from the fire, and the sharp warm smell of chickens. Siaran wrinkled her nose and looked again at the villagers. Besides terrified, many of them also looked wasted and had an ashen cast to their black skin. Bile rose in her throat, and it wasn't just from the stench. She'd have bet anything that some of those people were infected with cholera, on top of all the other indignities they were being made to suffer tonight.

She drew a breath; it hissed softly between her teeth. Her companion slid up beside her, peered briefly over the edge, and moved out of sight. Faint vibrations and stealthy sounds came from directly behind her: Rune, gathering his booted feet beneath him. Keeping her eyes on the scene below, she began to inch her knees up the tarred roof to do the same.

Suddenly, the knot of soldiers at the communal hearth broke up. One of them shouldered his rifle and strolled toward the huddle of frightened villagers. The woman who had been pinioned by him and his comrades crumpled into an inert heap in the mud. Siaran heard the hitch of barely-controlled sobs. After a moment, the woman raised her head and groped for her torn robe, pulling it over pitifully thin shoulders. One of the three men watching her kicked her experimentally in the ribs, studying his victim with a broad grin on his face. She collapsed again, and the robe fell away. This time, she didn't pull it back on.

The soldier turned his head, laughing, to say something to one of the others. His words were lost in a choking gurgle as Rune's bladed disc tore most of his throat away, severing carotid artery and jugular vein together in a fine high spray that glinted orange and black and red against the crackling flames of the bonfire.

The body dropped like a stone, eyes wide and shining in the dark face. The two soldiers beside him were rendered immobile with shock, unable to believe what had just happened, their faces warm and wet with the dead man's blood.

The deadly object spun back toward them; Rune snagged it expertly and melted back into the shadows behind the roof's peak.

That was cue enough for Siaran. She ducked back down and scrambled crabwise to the left edge of the house, nearest the villagers and their lone guard. She went over the eaves without a thought and dropped with a soft thud, letting loosely bent limbs absorb and dissipate the impact. Then she went light-footed around the corner of the house, ignoring the weapons in her belt for now, to intercept the soldier who had come over to select a new rape victim from the little crowd.

The first man had died so silently that this one, his back to the hearth, hadn't been aware of it. He was reaching for a trembling girl who couldn't have been more than fourteen when Siaran met him from the side, coming fast from the shadows at the side of the house. The other soldier, the guard, was staring dumbly at the dead man on the ground next to the hearth.

It had been so long since any of them had encountered the slightest resistance in these settlements that their training was for the moment suspended by disbelief. Additionally, the manner of their comrade's death—so swift and silent at the hands of an invisible assailant—evoked in some of them a superstitious dread of the unseen, the unknown, a dark god come out of the rainforest to punish them for their deeds. They were educated men, the pride of Zimbabwe's military, but some of them were haunted in the quiet hours of the night by the spirits of people like these villagers. For the moment, they didn't know what to do.

Siaran was under no illusions. She and Rune were outnumbered and outarmed, and the soldiers would begin to react soon. She knew she had to be very fast and very accurate to overcome the odds stacked against her. Surprise would be their biggest advantage, but she must use it effectively or it wouldn't help either of them.

Out of cover of darkness, she came in fast and struck the man's shoulder with her outstretched palm, hard enough to spin him toward her and make him let go of the frightened girl. He turned his head toward his antagonist, to his left. Into his eyes came first anger, then shock, then a spurt of fear without understanding. Siaran had come from nowhere, her mud-smeared skin as dark as his, her movements strong and sure. She pivoted from the hip, swinging her elbow in a short, vicious arc into the right side of the soldier's jaw.

She had hoped to knock him unconscious with the blow, to give herself time to deal with the other man. So when the soldier's head whipped in the direction of her strike, the direction it had been turning, and the sudden unnatural twist of his neck was accompanied by a sodden cracking, Siaran could hardly believe it.

There was no time to wonder whether she'd broken his neck by luck or by skill. In her peripheral vision, she saw Rune come off the roof, a nightmare of splayed claws, shining armor, and long beaded dreadlocks.

The guard had seen Rune by now; he had also seen Siaran fell the other soldier. With a shout, he raised his rifle. One thought rose to Siaran's mind: protect the people. Although she didn't want to look away from the guard, she whirled on the astounded villagers and spread her arms, hands open and empty to show them she meant no harm.

"Run," she told them in Shona; the language she'd spoken in childhood was coming back to give her the phrases she needed most in the crisis. Her thoughts felt as if they were going a thousand miles an hour, but each face was very clear, each sound sharp, each movement beginning to slow down as adrenaline spiked and focus became absolute. It was a heady feeling, but one she couldn't afford to revel in because it was there by virtue of both training and the organism's desire to preserve its own life. "Go inside your homes. Go now!"

To her relief, they went at once, too used to obedience to question her. They took hold of their children and of each other, and most of them darted into the two houses nearest. The young girl the dead soldier had plucked from the crowd paused to look down at his sightless face, and then brought her eyes up to Siaran where she stood over him. She smiled faintly, and then she was gone. Siaran let herself exhale and hoped they would have the sense to get down on, or if possible under, the floors once the shooting began. Those walls wouldn't stop a bullet

As she took her next breath, Siaran was already turning toward the guard.

The huge not-man thing at the hearth was killing, filling the night air with the smell of his brothers' blood. The guard couldn't shoot it for fear of hitting one of those still alive, and besides, it terrified him beyond sense. Instead, he'd taken a steadying breath and swung the muzzle instead at the mud-caked woman. She, at least, was human and vulnerable. She, at least, he could kill. His fingers were trembling, but he squeezed the sensitive trigger anyway.

The bullet left a spike of fire across the meat of Siaran's left shoulder. She shouted, a wordless cry of surprise and also a warning to Rune. She backed away on reflex and crashed against the flimsy chicken pen. The rotted wood gave way and she fell on her back, sending the fowl clucking and flapping away from the disturbance. Her head bounced hard off the rough cement pad that was buried under a few inches of mud and chicken droppings, but the fall probably saved her life.

Dammit, she hadn't been fast enough. The second shot came on the heels of the first, aimed where she had been standing. Siaran rolled onto her belly and half-crawled, half-slid through the slime, back into the narrow space between the house and the chicken coop. She got her feet under her and flexed her left shoulder; the bullet path hurt like a bitch, but she could still use her arm.

At a dead run, she fled around the back of the house, shoulder blades tensed and nerves tingling with the expectation that any second now there would be another bullet, that this one wouldn't miss, that she'd be shot in the back and left to die in the mud.

The settlement, never quiet since she and Rune had found it at the edge of the jungle, had exploded with noise. Men were shouting, _screaming_, a cacophony of human panic overlaying the roar and crackle of the bonfire. There—the zing of metal, then the meaty thud of it through flesh. That was Rune.

At a dead run, she rounded the far corner of the house, emerging close to the bonfire. Siaran could see, now, why nobody had shot at Rune. He was waist-deep in the pride of Mugabe's forces, camouflage and red berets and guns and grim black faces. He moved like a dervish among them, spinning, slicing, bent low because otherwise he would stand head and shoulders above the men and present his head as a prime target.

Four of the soldiers had come off the porch to help those at the hearth. Their mistake had been in thinking that the thing that had slain the first soldier had been a man, and they were fighting now with desperation born of fear. Fight or die; there was nothing else left for them.

The other men had withdrawn to the perimeter of the town square and taken up stances, aiming rifles with sweat on their faces, unable to kill the armored thing without taking down their own men.

Siaran could also see, in the second or two it took her to pass the bonfire and close the gap to the group around Rune, that one of the bastards had broken and run for the trucks. For the radios, to call for help. There was nothing she could do about that, so she ignored him for now, though it made her furious.

As soon as Rune saw her coming, he switched tactics. Siaran knew at once that most of the soldiers were still alive only because he had been fighting a nuisance action, shielding himself with the living bodies of his enemies while he waited to see how she'd come into the fight. Now, he began to kill in earnest, and even then the survivors didn't break and run, giving the men at the perimeter a clear shot. They had force of numbers on their side, and they still could not quite believe it when they began, rapidly, to die.

Mindful of the rifles, and still tensed to feel the blow of a projectile breaking her flesh, Siaran threw herself in a flat tackle at the first man. She hit him from behind and they both went down, rolling close to the fire.

He was big and very strong, and knew something of unarmed combat. He jabbed his elbow backwards as he lay beneath her, trying for an unprotected target. She squirmed to avoid it and hoisted herself up with a grunt, putting one knee solidly into his lower back. He cursed and bucked; her muddy hands slipped on the back of his neck as she struggled to hold him and then he flung her off. She rolled sideways and came up on all fours, and he might have taken her then except that he paused to grope for the pistol in the holster at his belt.

Siaran didn't wait, couldn't think lest knowledge keep her from doing what she must. She launched at him and came up low, found his eyes with both thumbs, cupped her fingers around the sides and back of his shorn head, and pushed. The sound he made was like nothing she had ever heard from a human throat. She felt the eyeballs burst and let go; he staggered backwards, blinded and screaming, and blundered like that into the inferno.

Siaran turned away, but couldn't block out the sounds after that, or the smell. Her hands were shaking but she couldn't stop now, not with people waiting to shoot her.

She looked up to see Rune above her. Flames flickered off his armor, giving it a hellish glow. Red blood dripped in long strings from his extended wristblades, and as she watched he caught the last upright soldier across the face with the wicked barbs and drove the other set through his belly. Siaran saw the tips protrude briefly from the man's back before Rune wrenched them out again and let the body fall.

She knew he missed his plasma caster and his shift suit; it was how his kind preferred to fight, not out in the open like this. Still, he was magnificent. He looked down at her, and she gave his dispassionate faceplate a fleeting smile of pride and sadness.

She started to get up, but Rune read her intentions and knocked her down again. That sweep of his arm accompanied the motion of his body; he pivoted toward the soldiers at the far end of the clearing and started to run, huge and terrifying and unbelievably fast.

Their bullets were faster. All the surviving soldiers began to fire at the same time, closing ranks for better aim. Siaran screamed, "No!" and bright green splashes appeared beneath Rune's chest armor, complementing the red already there. Rune didn't slow down. He hit them like a train and scattered them like chaff, and their rifles were no good at such close range while he began to tear into them.

Siaran was at his side a second later, the world a blur of red blood and green, firelight and moonlight. Rage filled her and she lashed and kicked at anything that came near her, anything that was not the rough-skinned armored creature at her side.

Suddenly, there was no sound except her own labored breathing, the crackle of the fire behind her, and the hissing chatter of Rune's mandibles behind his faceplate. The soldiers were dead. Siaran didn't know how many of them she had killed, or if she had just pummeled the corpses after Rune dispatched them. She looked down, and saw her muddy arms and chest flecked with iridescent blood.

"Rune..." Her breathing was painful, the breath sawing in and out of her raw throat. It hurt to talk. Bullets...somehow, that was worse than the sparring-floor injuries, the hound bites, even that awful wound from her spear. Bullets could lodge inside and kill him. She forgot that they were doomed to die anyway, and reached out for him.

Rune growled low and shoved her hand away. "You arre avenged?" he asked her softly, tilting his head sideways. Siaran closed her eyes briefly, not wanting to see the carnage she'd caused, nor think about the fact that it had certainly given away their location.

"Yes." Her voice was dull.

"Then we must hurrry."

Siaran opened her eyes. "Yes," she said again. Then she remembered the man who had gone for the Land Rovers, to radio for support. "Wait. There was one man..." She pointed at the trucks. There were three, but she thought there might have been four. She tried to remember whether she had heard an engine starting up amongst all the other noise, and couldn't. She shook her head. "I don't know if he got away, but I bet he called for help." She was whispering again, out of force of habit.

A sinister clicking roll came from Rune. He ran up the track, past the parked Land Rovers, with Siaran sprinting on his heels. The backlash from the fight hadn't exacted its toll of exhaustion and regret yet, and she'd have to keep it at bay for as long as she could if she was to continue functioning at the current tempo. If this night ended the way their hunters intended, she would never have to face it at all.

Rune skidded to a halt in the muddy Jeep track and raised his head, signaling for her to listen. She did, breathing shallowly and stretching her ears. Whatever animals moved in the forest to each side had been silenced by the fight in the settlement, though the buzz of insects still throbbed deep in the trees. A few seconds later, she heard the rumble of diesel engines, growing closer. Help could not have been that far away if it was arriving so soon. Rune pulled her six or eight steps into the foliage that paralleled the track, then paused again.

Fear sent a chill down Siaran's overheated spine, and she shivered. "Now would be a good time to run away," she muttered, and peered longingly into the dark anonymity of deep jungle.

Rune wasn't listening. He had dropped into a half crouch and was staring intently upward. Something about his body language shut Siaran up and made her take a soft, wary step back. She looked along the line of his gaze but could see nothing. Listening intently, all she could hear was the trucks' engines, getting closer. Nothing moved. Whatever Rune thought was up there, her unaugmented human senses couldn't detect it. Maybe it was nothing. Siaran started to relax.

The next instant, Rune was slammed backward against a Mubondo tree. He didn't move right away, his right shoulder pressed hard into the trunk and his arm hanging limply. Siaran watched as the thin, strong length of a barbed hunter's spear materialized, half its length protruding from Rune's shoulder, the other half buried in flesh, bone, and wood. A slight rustle above snapped her head up again, and through the filtered moonlight she saw the blue-lightning flashes as a hunter deactivated his shift suit.

He was standing in the crotch of a tall tree, arms braced against the offshooting branches, and when he saw Siaran and Rune watching him, he jumped the thirty feet to the jungle floor and landed as lightly as a panther. When he straightened, Siaran could see the telltale scrollwork on the highly stylized faceplate and knew it was Jackal.

In one bound, Jackal closed the distance to his victims. He reached for the handle of the protruding spear and pushed it a foot deeper. Siaran heard living wood squeal as the point was forced out the other side of the tree, but Rune made no sound, only turning his head to look at his former groupmate.

Breath left her in a sharp exhalation. She'd learned to be quick when drawing her weapons and was now unnaturally fast at it by human standards. She was quicker now, spurred by hate. Her hands flew to the short sword at her side and pulled it free.

Despite her heightened reflexes, Jackal was faster. He turned in one swift movement and batted her away with his free hand. Siaran was flung back into the thorns of an acacia bush. She lay there for a second, winded and coughing, her body aching from the blow.

Jackal came up and brought one foot down across her ankles. The pain was exquisite; not enough to break the bones, but certainly enough to grind them together. Slowly, casually, and with infinite malice, he drew a ritual dagger from his belt and knelt over Siaran. In his harsh whisper, he said, "Sssso. You will kill yourrr own kind, but not a trraitor." He cocked the masked head. "Yourrr ssspine will make a good trrrophy to rrremind me of...human loyalty." He put mockery into the last two words. Then he seized Siaran under the jaw, forced her head back, and put the tip of the dagger on her neck, just below the ear.

It wasn't her best hand, but it was the left that had grabbed the long knife as she fell, and it would have to do. The tip of Jackal's dagger was sharp as a razor, and he intended to cut the spine from her body without delivering a killing blow first. Siaran suspected he hoped she'd live as long as possible during this procedure, so that she would die full of fear and the knowledge that she was helpless, that she was Jackal's creature in the end, the way he liked things.

She narrowed her focus to a pinpoint as she felt the dagger begin its cut, and with all her strength brought to bear on a single act, drove the knife deep into Jackal's belly just above the belt. On a human, that was the location of the abdominal aorta, and hunter physiology was similar to a human's in the most basic respects. The dagger slipped out of her skin; Jackal's hissing gurgle jolted her with savage exultation.

He sagged and his weight came off her legs. Siaran twisted and got loose. Her skin jumped and shuddered, the nerves still feeling the contact of the dagger, but she was otherwise unhurt. Blood ran freely down her neck to mingle with the mud, but there was nothing she could do about that for the moment. She moved quickly across to Rune.

He had turned his head and was watching her, quiet against the tree and very still. Siaran heard Jackal struggling in the bush but ignored him for now. Her promise to kill him was overridden by the need to help Rune. Besides, maybe the knife had done its work and all she had to do was wait for the bastard to bleed to death. Certainly she'd hurt him, or she wouldn't be alive right now.

Still, there was no time to waste. With desperate eyes, she looked at the haft of the spear, how far it was buried into Rune and in the tree. She wondered if she'd be able to pull it free. There wasn't enough of the point sticking out of the tree trunk behind Rune to give her a grip, and she didn't have the nerve and maybe not even the strength to force the thing the rest of the way through him.

There was no way she could leave him here, though. Jackal had already found them, so others must be close. With both hands, Siaran took hold of the leather-wrapped spear haft and tugged, then pulled, then yanked. Sweat or tears ran down her face, making rivulets in the mud; she was terrified of hurting Rune further, and terrified of not being able to get the spear out. The weapon wouldn't budge; it had gone into his shoulder, and that was too high up to give Siaran decent leverage. Besides, he was so ominously still.

Then his hand closed around both of hers, and the impassive eye slits set in his helmet bored into her. Rune gave a slight nod. Siaran felt his armor shift as he drew a deep breath and tensed the muscles in his chest. Then they both pulled. With a tearing scream, the spear came back out of the tree, grated out of bone and bleeding flesh. Rune's right arm still hung at his side, and though he twitched his fingers he couldn't raise the arm. Socket damage, Siaran guessed, and felt a great wave of despair and anger, opposing emotions that immobilized and silenced her.

She was filthy and frightened, and had killed at least twice tonight—no, murdered; there was no pussyfooting around that. The determination that had taken her this far began to meet stronger opposition. She struggled to get a grip on herself, sensing that she was close to emotional collapse. That wasn't an option, not tonight, not as long as she had breath. Her jaw clenched, and her fists, and she asked between her teeth, "Can you run?"

Instead of answering, Rune spun heavily toward the acacia thicket where Jackal had been. Their once-teammate was standing in front of the thicket now, hunched over with one hand pressed to a spreading, bright-green stain on his lower belly. Long strands of the stuff dripped to pool in the crushed foliage at his feet. In his other hand, Jackal held Siaran's knife.

A burst of blue-white light seemed to come from everywhere at once. The jungle was lit up in a confused tangle of vines and trees and shadows, the whole effect strobing as lightning flashed twice more, revealing another two hunters as they came through the trees to help Jackal finish the hunt. Jackal shifted his grip on the knife and roared, shaking his head in challenge at Rune, who roared back at him. Then the other two hunters added their voices and extended their spears, moving out to flank Rune.

This was it, then. The final confrontation was on them, they were outnumbered three to two, and Rune had only one working arm. Her sword was lost somewhere in the acacia, but she still held the spear that was covered with Rune's blood. She gripped it, her fingers suddenly sensitive to the knotted leather of the haft and the warm sticky substance that slipped beneath her skin; it would probably be the last thing she would feel, besides pain.

They were all making a great deal of noise, but Siaran supposed that didn't matter anymore. She wished she'd had time to say a proper goodbye to Rune, whatever it might have been. Wristblades flicked out over Rune's left hand and he brought that arm up in a guard position. Unexpectedly, he stepped in front of her, blocking her view of things.

His bulk should have made it harder to see, but something wasn't right. The light ... She turned around and saw bright white light streaming through the trees from the track, where seconds ago had been only darkness. It had been so long since she'd seen headlights that for a second or two she didn't recognize them for what they were. Human voices raised in shouts then, and Siaran understood what they must be seeing: massive forms silhouetted against their truck lights, just a few paces inside the trees. They'd been easy to find, of course. The racket the hunters made would have woken the dead.

Siaran heard and translated the call to open fire, and dove unthinking at Rune just as he lowered his head for one last heroic charge. Her tackle caught him behind the knees. They both dropped to the thick carpet of foliage just as machine-gun fire exploded through the jungle night, sending leaves and tree-bark splinters flying in a weird, destructive rain.


	19. What the Jungle Saw

**Chapter 19 – What the Jungle Saw**

The night went mad. Tracer fire wove a red-orange web that made a mockery of darkness and cover. The shock and sound of near-point blank machine gun fire wove itself with the cries of men and the furious roars of the hunters until the little patch of jungle sounded like an all-night party in Hell. Brilliant little blobs of light made firework bursts when bullets hit the hunters. Other bullets lanced into trees and rocks to create explosions of wood slivers and stone chips, hazardous as shrapnel. Some rounds went into the dense thickets, and here the phosphorus coating licked the dry acacia, and began to burn.

Smoke grew and thickened, increasing the infernal quality of the battle and confusing the senses. It thickened in the little hollow where Siaran and Rune lay. The crackle of fire and the medicinal, woody odor of burning acacia added itself to the cacophony. Siaran could feel heat through the soles of her boots; turning her head, she saw a red-orange glare behind the pall of smoke, blazing from the same thicket where she'd stabbed Jackal. Her heart was thumping so painfully it felt as if her head was wobbling in time. They would have to move soon or risk burning, but if they ran now they'd be cut to pieces. She pushed her face into the dank leaf mold to help her breathe, to think.

The two hunters who'd joined Jackal roared with fury and leaped for the high branches of the trees. Only one of them made it; despite the smoke, the soldiers had the advantage of shooting with the light behind them, and the tracer rounds revealed the location of their shadowy quarry in the tangle of jungle. They cut down one hunter as he moved, the bullets going _pock pock pock_ into flesh and zinging off armor, bright green spraying into the air, until too many found throat and belly and a growl turned first to a gurgle, then to a dense thud as the body fell.

Hoarse shouts of triumph, cut short by a terse warning, came from behind them, where the lights were. Siaran could just hear them over the din of machine guns and the roaring panic in her own head. Rune rumbled, somewhere just above her head, and touched her bare shoulder where the bullet had cut her. The pain made her hiss and look up, and she saw what he saw: the streaks of rifle fire had swung upward, following the path of the other hunter as he sought the cover of the jungle canopy.

This would be the only chance they had. Rune was up, a dark shadow coiled and bunched with muscle, one taloned hand dragging Siaran by main force up beside him. Smoke wafted across them; she coughed and ducked her head. Rune barked the imperative that meant _run_, and he did: hunched low and zigzagging through the night, back toward the settlement, angled away from the soldiers behind them. She started after him, then screamed as agony ripped through her calf, the muscle tensed with her weight and with the fast-twitch command to run. She fell, and something embedded in the meat of her calf shore downward through the muscle. The pain was liquid and immense; light exploded behind her eyes and her breath left her in a gasp.

The thing holding her flipped her roughly onto her back. Something heavy, with clattering breathing, fell on her, blocking out the dazzling red streaks overhead, dripping green goo into her face and open mouth as his body sought to crush hers. She spat the stuff out, weakly, and struggled to breathe.

Jackal hissed. His faceplate was gone, and bullets had ripped off the knobs on one side of his skull, leaving a mess of blood and sadly dangling tentacles. He looked down at her with mandibles flared and glinting teeth spread wide. His breath was labored and it stank, but there was enough life in him to end hers. Jackal's inner teeth snapped once, viciously, and he hissed, "When I bite out your thrrroat ... how long do you thhink you can live?"

Siaran didn't answer, couldn't; the lights behind her eyes were giving way to great blobs of dark red and purple as she suffocated. Sound was fading; her chest was on fire. It outraged her that Jackal should be the one to win in the end, but she couldn't struggle, couldn't even move.

The glinting head of a hunter spear buried itself in the top of Jackal's cranium where he loomed over her. Siaran blinked up at it, her woozy brain failing at first to make the necessary connection. Jackal's open jaws went slack, and the terrible eyes flickered in surprise. They flickered once more, feebly, then the crushing weight rolled off her, or was kicked.

"Longerrr than you," said Rune in English, and leaving the spear where it was, hauled Siaran to her knees and whacked her left-handed on the back. She coughed, then did it again, then drew air into her starving lungs in a great sob. It tasted delicious, even though she coughed on the acrid tang of smoke.

Leaves and splinters fell all around them, destroyed by the relentless machine guns. A heavy crashing came from overhead, and suddenly there were more big shadowy shapes in the smoke; two, then three, swung out of the treetops beyond where Siaran and Rune crouched, descending in long graceful arcs toward the headlights out on the track. Weapons preceded them: spears and spinning discs and little points of metal shot from wrist bracers.

Men started screaming in the night because the third surviving hunter had been joined by his brothers, and their vengeance was terrible. The tracer fire swung in a new direction. Through the confused tangle of noise came a massive concussion that shook the ground and left her ears aching from the explosive whine: a rocket-propelled grenade, though neither Siaran nor Rune knew its name. On its heels, in retaliation, came the telltale blue-white burst of a hunter's shoulder cannon.

"Time to go," gasped Siaran, walked two steps forward, and fell. Jackal's talons had traumatized her right calf too deeply for it to bear her weight. She caught herself on her hands, trembling, and swore. Rune didn't hesitate; he grabbed her around the middle and hauled them both partially upright. He ran, Siaran limped along on her left foot, and nobody shot at them.

The sounds of fighting were still much too close ten seconds later, when they broke out again into the clearing beyond the settlement, and saw three Land Rovers untended in the moonlight.

The keys were in the ignition of the nearest one. Siaran wrenched open the passenger door; Rune helped her crawl inside, then followed, squeezing his bulk into the front seat. He had to hunch to fit; even then, his massive head pressed against the unpadded roof and his armor-plated knees were jammed against the dash. Siaran would have laughed at the image if their situation hadn't been so dire, or if her leg didn't hurt so damn bad.

She turned the key, put in the clutch, found first gear, and shoved her right foot through a brick wall of pain onto the accelerator. Her lower leg lacked the fine coordination needed to ease on and off the gas, so she just left it there when she shifted, letting the engine roar in impotent protest.

They bumped along the track through the village, past the bonfire, and out the other side into a little-used, grass-covered narrow path between the trees. The Land Rover barely fit. Siaran steered grimly through the jouncing, and every attempt to speak ended in a gasp. She soon gave it up, and concentrated on driving as fast as she could. Whoever came out the victor in the battle was bound to come after them, so she drove with the lights off. They left the settlement and the sounds of fighting behind. The jungle closed around again from all sides, blocking out the moonlight.

One of two things was going to happen, Siaran thought as she fought the wheel. Either the track was going to take them somewhere they didn't want to be, like another village or military encampment, or they were going to crash into a tree.

In the end, it was neither. Siaran had been driving for roughly ten minutes when the trees gave way to a broad swath of grassland, walled by jungle. The moon was bright, and she could see that the track ended here. She killed the engine and eased her trembling foot off the accelerator, aware of how harsh her breathing was in the enclosed space. She felt thirsty and light-headed. From somewhere in the dark came the contended lowing of cattle; the track must serve to connect the village with the pastures at this end.

Suddenly, below and beyond the westering full moon, the sky was lit by a massive blue-white flash. Siaran and Rune squinted through the muddy and fly-specked windshield and saw a fireball rising from the trees, boiling away the initial color of the thermal charge with searing flame. A second later came the sound: a great booming _whump_.

They were far enough away that the concussive shock wave couldn't reach them, but the force of the explosion told its own tale.

Siaran sat in the driver's seat, feeling dizzy and numb, her eyes dazzled by the detonation and her mind shocked by all it implied. "What—" she said, and swallowed. She couldn't say more; could only stare.

Rune rumbled, "They used ..." He made a garbled sound Siaran couldn't understand. "... To you, a bomb. They arrre gone."

"All of them?" It came out a whisper, but she didn't need the answer and Rune didn't give it. The bomb had detonated maybe fifty meters from the village. All those people Siaran had thought she'd saved must be dead.

They looked at each other in silence for a long moment. Rune was still, a dark statue with silvered edges. For the first time, Siaran realized he was pressed against her. His skin felt rough and feverishly hot against her mud-smeared arm. She shivered and blinked, dragging her mind with effort back to their present circumstances.

"If we can go south, get across the border to South Africa..." She stopped. If they could get into South Africa, what then? Would they be safe? Not likely. Rune would be killed or captured; he was extraterrestrial, something that even to science was still mostly implausible. And what about her? How could she go back to ordinary life after everything she'd seen and done? She had returned to her home planet and almost at once begun killing people of her own free will. Had living with Rune's people changed her that much?

Siaran felt suddenly dizzy. Her head buzzed; she could feel it in her throat when she swallowed. Her leg twitched against the seat and she felt something warm and sticky on flesh that was almost numb. Confused, she switched on the interior light and looked down.

Blood was smeared on the seat. It covered her lower leg, gleaming red-black on her black canvas pants, which were shredded where Jackal had torn into her calf. The blood had dripped to form a pool below her foot and spread across the floor mat. Her calf throbbed and burned, and when Siaran turned her leg to survey the damage, cramp rippled up to her hip, stiffening her and bringing a whimper to her throat even though she tried to keep her jaw clamped shut.

Panting, she turned back to Rune and tried to ease her injured leg. Her vision was blurry, dancing with with little spots of light. "Got any of that blue stuff on you?" she asked him thickly, and passed out.

The cattle in the grass turned their heads when the Land Rover's metal door creaked open. The bulls scented the night air and smelled blood and something else, something strange and maybe threatening, but they were at a safe distance. The things coming out of the truck did not in any case seem interested in them, anymore than the big noise that had startled them earlier had been interested in them. They gave a couple of warning lows, then went back to chewing their cuds and watching.

The big two-legged shape pulled out the smaller one, which was limp. It slung the smaller shape over its shoulder, taking great care with the metal plates it wore there, and moved off through the grass toward the jungle wall. The cattle watched it until it passed among the trees, out of their sight and memory.

Monkeys in the trees, normally never silent at night, fell quiet as the big prowling thing made its way along the ground. They could smell a human and a human's blood, and so could the hunting cats that stalked the soft-furred scurrying game on the ground. The other smell, though, the smell of the big prowling thing, was strange and threatening. The monkeys hugged their young tight and scrambled higher in the trees. The little jungle cats hesitated with delicate paws raised, then gave it a wide berth.

Rune moved through the jungle at a steady, water-smooth lope. His right shoulder ached and he could feel the broken joint grating as he moved, but his pace ate up the miles and he showed no sign of weakening. His blood had run down his chest armor to mingle with Siaran's strange, thick red blood. He had done what he could to bind her wound, but he lacked proper supplies and the damage was deep.

As he moved, he spoke softly in his own tongue. "Little one," he said to the unconscious human he carried, "We are both ghosts now. You have killed your own kind, as I have killed mine, for the sake of vengeance and not mercy. Soon, we will not even have each other." The truth of that made him melancholy, which was not a proper state for a warrior.

He stopped, all that forward motion coiling into inert power as he stood on foreign soil, an uncertain exile. The trees and jungle night bore witness as Rune shifted his burden, cradling her now in his good arm, and bent his helmed head. "Yeyin-de I name you, little brave one." A new sound came from his throat, a raspy cry somewhere between fury and despair, quickly muted. "In my tribe, earning your name means you would hunt with me, and learn from me, and inherit all things from me. You have shown that you can adapt where my people cannot."

The great head dropped lower, so that Siaran's inert face was curtained by smooth cords of bound hair. Deep in his throat, Rune whispered, "If I am to live, I must learn from you. I do not know if it is possible."

She did not respond. Rune raised his head. It was only a notion anyway. No human prey would ever be accepted by a warrior tribe, no matter how resourceful. Jackal, his own clan brother, had proved that. So had the swift reactions of the others to Jackal's accusations. Rune alone, then, was the dissenter. Now he was the outcast, and soon, he felt, he would be dead.

He did not fear death. Already he thought he could sense the slow silent footfalls of Cetanu in his wake. The dark god would claim him, no matter how far from home he was, when the kiss of midnight came to him at last. He could find comfort in that, while he still walked a planet on which he had no wish to live, not without a tribe, however glorious the hunting might be. And although Siaran had once joked that they were a tribe now, the two of them, he could not keep her with him to share those hunts. He'd already seen how killing other humans affected her, even though she had not voiced the suffering and confusion in her eyes.

His responsibility was to her. His last responsibility. Rune shifted Siaran's light weight to his shoulder again, and picked up his steady southward pace. He did not know what he was looking for, but he felt he would know it when he saw it.

The sun rose. Shafts of green-filtered gold light fell softly through the canopy. Heat came to the jungle floor and was magnified by the humidity in the foliage. Rune basked in it; this was very close to his native environment. Monkeys and parrots, high in the forest canopy, cried a greeting to the dawn and fell silent as he passed. His head moved constantly, flicking from one vision source to the next, assessing all life and movement and finding no threat, only things that feared him and fled from him. That was good.

He scented water and shifted his course that way. Pushing through the leaves, he found a small clearing where half a dozen wild pigs drank at a muddy pool fed by an underground spring. Ferns and moss grew thickly around the pool. The pigs started at his approach and darted off through the undergrowth, squealing.

Rune knelt and placed Siaran carefully on the ground. Her skin was dry and hot under the mud, which he knew wasn't good. The water in the pool was filthy from the pigs, but he ran some of it through the filter in the small survival kit that also housed his breather gear. That took care of any parasites. He squeezed a few drops of pure water down her throat and was relieved when she swallowed. After he'd drunk his fill and checked the bandage he'd fashioned from her ripped pants, he picked Siaran carefully up again and continued on, faster now.

There had been no pursuit. Anyone who would have gone after them was dead, vaporized in the warriors' thermal detonation. Even so, he'd been careful to leave no trail when he'd gone south into deep jungle. Someone was bound to find the abandoned vehicle at some point, and Rune couldn't afford to take the chance that he might be tracked. He had one slim chance for survival, and he intended to take it once he had ensured Siaran's safety. The somber mood from the previous night had lifted; now he felt only determination.

Siaran's continued unconsciousness and weakening vital signs drove him faster. Her pulse was rapid and her breathing faint. Rune could travel like this for days, even with his injuries; but she could not, and it was beyond his power to give her what she needed. With no other recourse, the big predator loped tirelessly through the humid morning. When the sun was near its zenith, he found the place he'd been looking for.

He smelled the change in the air, saw the brightening of the leaf-filtered light, and paused at the jungle threshold. Just ahead was an artificial cutaway. The earth was dusty and parched there, missing the trees it had once nurtured. The sharp tang of hot metal drifted to him on the breeze; Rune adjusted his vision sensor and saw the tall wire fence stretching across the yellow dirt. Beyond that was a strip of black tarmac, running east to west. At the east end lay sparser jungle and, at the edge of sight, flashes of rectangular white structures. To the west, the road ran to the broad shining curve of a river; the dense rainforest followed its arc along the horizon. Heat rippled from the tarmac. So did the reek of tar and oil.

For a long time, he stood very still inside the green shroud. The wind rustled lightly through the trees, insects buzzed, and finally the Doppler sound of a vehicle approaching from the west reached the sensitive receptors in Rune's helmet. The engine faded as the driver switched gears, then roared strongly again. He had a minute, maybe a little more.

He felt exposed without his shift-suit control as he stepped out of the trees onto open ground. The lost earth was hot and dry beneath his feet; the yellow star hotter overhead. Six steps brought Rune to the chain link, which he sliced open easily with an extended wrist blade. Bending the broken links apart, he stepped through and looked around for a moment, getting his bearings.

Southward, the land was wide and flat beneath a washed-out blue sky. The yellowish cast to earth where the trees no longer grew seemed unhealthy, and Rune fancied he could smell burning as its bones were mined for diamonds and soft heavy gold. He shook his head impatiently. Now was not the time for imagination. The green jungle at his back was safe and anonymous; its depths called him back.

At the edge of the black road, Rune very gently laid Siaran in the dust. She didn't stir, but he felt a whisper of her breath on his hair-cords as he slid her off his shoulder, and was encouraged by that. He knelt over her and listened to the approaching vehicle. Half a minute. His right arm wouldn't work; the fingers were already stiff and he could feel mortification at work in those muscles, burning and numbing at the same time.

With a growl, he reached across to his right side with his left hand and removed a small flat object from his belt. Carefully, he tucked it into Siaran's shoe, as he'd seen her do with the hound fangs he'd saved for her. The vehicle was nearly upon them. Rune stretched out his fingers and brushed them across Siaran's forehead, her strange nose, and stranger mouth. He rose with a purring growl and melted back through the fence and into the jungle. From just inside the screen of trees, he waited and watched.

"Whoa, Dan! Slow down, there! Look." One of the men in the truck grabbed the driver's arm and pointed at the figure lying in the shoulder.

The driver swerved at the unexpected grab to his arm, swore, and over corrected the wheel, narrowly missing the girl on one side and the ditch on the other. "Don't _do _that!" he snapped at his passenger. "Probably just another god-damned refugee anyway, half dead and not worth saving. Christ, we're being overrun." But he was already braking the truck, and before he'd got it stopped, Kevin, bless the kid's innocent heart, was out on the runner boards and leaping to the aid of the latest native to make it into South Africa from Zimbabwe.

"She's still alive, Danilo!" Kev called from where he bent over the skinny girl. "Hurt though, I think. God, she must've come a long way, she's in terrible shape."

Biting back a sigh, Danilo trudged across the hot tarmac, pushing back his hat to reveal a sunburned forehead. October was no more or less hot here than any other month, but today was being a particular bastard when it came to heat. His khaki uniform was prickly with sweat, even though the truck was air-conditioned. And now here came the refugees. Must've been the full moon last night, driving the natives crazy. There'd been something on the radio this morning about an explosion up north, no official reports from Mugabe of course, no surprise there.

Closer, Dan could see that Kev was right: the girl was in bad shape. Her long dark hair was a matted, sorry mess. She was dressed in some kind of one-piece dark bathing suit, with heavy black pants that had been torn away at one knee and used to tie a homemade bandage around her calf. She'd bled some into the dust. There was also some weird green stuff smeared on the dark skin of her shoulder, speckled on her face, and mingling with her own blood in the dirt.

He sniffed cautiously, unhappy about having a stinking and possibly cholera-infected refugee in the cab of the truck, of which he was justifiably proud. Its new green paint had the logo of Mapungubwe National Park emblazoned on both doors, and it ran like clockwork. More to the point, his bosses would have his hide if he dirtied it. But she only smelled like mud and sweat, and anyway young Kevin would give him no peace until he'd agreed to help. He was fond of the boy, and not just because he was his wife's nephew; the kid worked hard and brought good cheer to hard times. Danilo glanced at his watch and shrugged. They were running ahead of schedule, and he'd smelled worse.

"All right, let's get her in the truck," he told the younger man resignedly, and Kevin fairly skipped with delight. Save the world, that one would, if he could. Dan spat onto the road and shook his head. "Make it fast. Hospital's half an hour away and we still have to get back across the Limpopo with the feed haul for tonight." With Kevin at the girl's feet, Danilo stooped from his lean six-foot height and scooped his arms under her shoulders. "Just hope she's not dead," he muttered under his breath, too low for Kev to hear.

She was more slippery than he'd expected; Dan swore and nearly dropped her, digging his fingers into her upper arms to keep hold of her. Her black skin had a weird texture, slimy and flaky, and he nearly dropped her again when he saw that his fingers had gouged long pale streaks through it. "Mud," he said in disbelief. "She's covered in _mud_."

"Ag," said Kevin succinctly, when he saw that. The accent he gave the slang made his Dutch ancestry plain, which had always amused Danilo. Now, as they stared down at the limp body slung between them, Dan found nothing amusing about the situation, nothing at all. Kev squinted up at him. "She's no refugee, is she, Dan?"

Danilo sighed. His day had just gotten a lot more complicated.

He and Kev were too preoccupied with loading the mysterious, unconscious non-refugee into the crew cab's back seat to pay the slightest attention to the ticking rattle that came from the trees behind them. The jungle was always full of weird noises, even at midday.


	20. This Sterile Promontory

**Chapter 20 – This Sterile Promontory**

At first, Siaran put her restlessness and irritation down to culture shock and even the local accent. The people who spoke to her sounded like Australians, but without the clipped drawl; they blurred consonants and rounded vowels in unfamiliar ways. She slept often, those first few days after awakening in a stifling-hot communal hospital. People came to ask her questions, and she avoided the necessity of speaking by sleeping even more. After spending such a long time communicating only on the most basic levels and watching the straightforward play of cause and effect in her uncomplicated companions, she felt battered and exhausted when she tried to divine the myriad nuances of vocal tone and facial expression in the people who wanted to know who she was and where she'd come from, and how she had ended up in South Africa. Half the time, she didn't even have to feign weariness when she wanted them to leave her alone.

Within a week, Siaran knew her agitation was due not to accent but to people themselves.

The hospital was an oven, and it stank. Sick people and high summer in South Africa were a mix that, Siaran felt, would soon drive her to madness. There was no air conditioning, nor any privacy. She had a bed and a small, rickety table in a long room with a dozen or so other patients, with not even a curtain between beds. The paint peeled off the whitewashed walls and the windows were left open to relieve the stench of sickness and bodily functions. That brought the flies in; orderlies and nurses were forever swatting them or crunching over their small winged carapaces in their crepe-soled shoes.

Siaran disliked her doctors, distrusted the policemen, and loathed the arrogant, sneering diplomat sent by the local U.S. Embassy for the purpose, she supposed, of explaining to her that without identification or proof of citizenship, she did not officially exist in the eyes of the United States government. He seemed to take great satisfaction in telling her this, and smiled patronizingly at her when she protested that she was _there_, wasn't she, bored to death and recovering in a hospital bed and having a conversation with him. How could he sit there and inform her that she didn't exist?

When pretending to sleep was no longer an option for dealing with these people, Siaran propped herself up in bed and ran her fingers endlessly over the slick, grooved surface of the thick plastic card that had been found stuffed into her boot. The authorities had confiscated the two animal teeth that had also been found there, on the charge that they must be lions' teeth and therefore completely illegal, and she had better watch it, young lady, or she'd find herself in a world of trouble. The policeman who'd taken the fangs had admired them with piggy little eyes before dropping them into his pocket. He beamed at her, his eyes nearly lost in the fat flesh on his face. His smile held greed and stupidity and nothing else. No doubt he'd sell the fangs on the black market later for a handsome price. Siaran hated him.

They'd let her keep the card because they didn't know what it was and, strange though it looked, it appeared to be harmless. Siaran herself didn't know what it was, nor why Rune had left it with her. She shied away from that thought, though; thinking about Rune was not only painful and confusing, but it could alter her responses to the endless, repetitive questions she was subject to and maybe dissolve whatever headway she might be making into talking herself free.

She kept hold of the card at all times, running her fingers over its surface and edges, holding it to the light to watch the play of red and black fuse and dissolve as she turned it from side to side. It was a mystery she was determined to solve, but she had to get out of the hospital first. She told the staff psychiatrist, the police, and the idiot from the Embassy her name. She told them she didn't know how she'd gotten to South Africa, which they knew anyway because she'd been brought in unconscious, and her rescuers had insisted she'd been unconscious when they found her. She told them that she'd spent most of the past five months on a ship, which she had in a way, and that she'd been kidnapped while driving across Mongolia, which she hadn't.

Her calf, expertly stitched despite the destitute appearance of the hospital, itched abominably. It was hot. The flies buzzed. People moaned and begged and cried until she thought she would climb the walls with her fingernails to get away from them; they reminded her of the villagers in Zimbabwe, and that too she could not think about. She longed for the solitude of her quarters aboard the hunter ship, the tank of healing radiant fluid, and the mental and physical activity of the training hall.

There was never enough to eat, although Siaran found she was ravenous for the bread and fruit she was brought three times a day. That was the highlight of her recovery. The rest of the time she spent feeling either numb or, increasingly, angry.

When the staff shrink, the fat policemen, and the Embassy stuffed-shirt all came to see her at once, she endured their questions for an hour before she snapped. The three men drew back in surprise at her sudden violent animation. The other inmates in the room were not surprised and, after glancing in fright at the dark-haired foreign woman ranting from her bed, glanced as quickly away again. They had all seen Siaran catch fly after fly between thumb and forefinger, and they had all heard her twitching and growling in her sleep like an animal. It was unnatural. The less they had to do with her, the better.

The hospital's chief doctor had been taking the air outside on the hospital grounds and heard the disturbance when he passed the open window of the ward. Worried about the commotion with such a prestigious person as the American ambassador in his hospital, he rushed back inside. The American woman was sitting bolt upright in bed, her dark hair tangled and sweaty around her pale face, her fists knotted so that every muscle stood out in her scarred (but surprisingly strong; the good doctor had discovered that the hard way when he'd awakened her from a nightmare, and his eye socket was still tender) arms. She was screaming obscenities, spittle flying from her lips and those blue-gray eyes blazing, filling her face.

The doctor beckoned to one of the larger orderlies as he rushed to restrain her. He was already forming an abject apology in his head when he heard the words _James and Monica Moss_ come out of the woman's mouth in an hysterical screech. She ranted on, only partly coherent, about how they could go find their graves in Mozambique, she could tell them exactly where they were buried and how they had died, and they could use _that _as proof of identification, and then stick it up their collective, sublimely stupid asses.

The doctor felt a great weight constrict around his chest. "Stop!" he cried, more loudly than he intended, and every head, including Siaran's, turned toward him. "You—what did you say?" the chief doctor asked her. He had to be sure.

"About what?" She might have quieted down, but that didn't mean she relished his interruption. Her voice was a snarl, stripped of any courtesy.

"You said—" the doctor swallowed, took another step forward, and ran a thin hand through the thinner hair on the crown of his head. He felt a great sadness, and a great weariness; he was thinking of something he'd not thought of in years, and would have preferred to forget. He thought he _had _forgotten it, until just now. Sweat began to bead on the high bridge of his nose, beneath his spectacles. They slid down a fraction of an inch. Mother of Christ, it was hot in here. "You said _James and Monica Moss_."

The livid color went out of Siaran's face, leaving her skin looking drained and her cheeks hollow. But her eyes burned brighter than ever, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that the doctor met those eyes. She was uncannily still and focused, like a hunting thing. It unnerved him.

Siaran licked dry lips. "Yes," she whispered. "I did say that."

The doctor's whisper was even softer. "Why?"

For a long moment she just looked at him. The overweight policeman sniffed and shifted on his feet; uncomfortable in his tight uniform on a hot October day. Finally, the American said in a rigidly-controlled voice, "They were my parents."

After that, things happened much more swiftly. The good doctor, whose name was Niemand, had studied with the Mosses during their first externship in Johannesburg, before Siaran had been born. They had become, if not quite friends, at least more than work colleagues. He had even visited them several times in Mozambique, at their invitation, to see how they were getting on with improving the health care of that destitute region.

With the help of Dr. Niemand, Siaran made phone calls to her parents' lawyer and to her master instructor back home, feeling strangely disconnected as she did. She'd been reported missing when she'd failed to turn up at the Ulan Bator Worlds, and it seemed there had been an impressive manhunt for her, spurred on perhaps by the size of the trust fund her parents had set up for her long before their deaths. Within a week, she was pronounced fit, released from the hospital, and chartered on a flight from Tambo International Airport back to the U.S., Washington, Bremerton—home.

That left her with several days' wait while missing persons paperwork was cleared up stateside and her family's attorney moved mountains to obtain and send her a replacement passport. Under the cover of wishing to thank the two park rangers who had brought her to the hospital, Siaran borrowed some krugerand from Dr. Niemand, rented a decrepit car, and drove back to the border.

It was hopeless. She didn't know where she'd been found and had been unable to contact the Mapungubwe rangers—a call to the park office had only gotten her the information that Mr. Danilo and Mr. Kevin were out on the river somewhere. Siaran drove mile after mile past the burned-out plain of industry on her left and the green dense jungle on her right, walled behind chain link and razor wire. Thirsty and discouraged, she finally pulled the wheezing car off the blacktop onto the dusty shoulder. The door creaked as she opened it and climbed out, water bottle in one hand.

Automatically, her other hand reached into the back pocket of her Catholic thrift-shop jeans—too short and too baggy—and emerged with the not-quite-credit-card-sized rectangle of slick, grooved plastic. She hesitated, then held it before her as she walked across the parched ground, up to the border fence, feeling both apprehensive and a little foolish.

The day was hot; all the days had been hot since she'd awoken in the hospital. The sun was a painful blaze overhead that bleached the sky nearly white. In the far western distance was the silver gleam of the Limpopo River. Siaran drank in thirsty swallows from her bottle, letting the water spill down her chin and throat, not caring that it spotted the front of her faded t-shirt. Only when the bottle was empty did she pause to listen, half closing her eyes in concentration. The jungle beyond the fence was alive with sounds: the buzz and whir of diurnal insects and the occasional rustle as something larger moved. Behind her, the only sound was the wind, stirring up the yellow dust. There were no other cars on the road: it was midafternoon, siesta time for South Africa's population.

She held the black plastic card aloft. Colors shifted below its slick outer surface, subtle holographic blacks and reds with no definite shape or substance. "Rune," Siaran called; then, louder: "Rune!"

There was no answer. She waited. After a long time, her shoulder began to ache and she lowered the card, feeling even more foolish than before, and not at all sure why she'd come here. Probably she wasn't even in the right place. Possibly Rune was dead; she'd seen the terrible wound in his shoulder from Jackal's spear, and had watched dozens of rounds of bullets go into that powerful body. The driving force that had brought her here was that, beyond probability and possibility, she knew that Rune had planted the strange card on her for a reason. She didn't know what the reason was, or where Rune might be, or even how far he'd traveled to bring her to the border.

She'd returned, card in hand, to wait for him. He hadn't come. He'd brought her to the border and left her there. It was knowledge, even fact, and it looked like she would have to accept it, or risk staying out here until some roving band from the cities happened upon her and decided to do whatever it was they did to lone female tourists.

Part of her hoped that would happen. Funny how she's spent so long caught between dread of being hunted and longing to go back home, and now that she was home, she would give anything to be faced with a fight, to feel the fizz of adrenaline in her blood and the joy of using her fitness and training again in battle. But no one drove past to attack her, and no silent-moving alien hunter emerged from the green depths in answer to her call.

Siaran raised the hand holding the card to her face and covered her eyes with it. Her long hair, unbound and tangled with wind and sweat, fell over her shoulders like a funereal cloak. Everything she had learned and seen and done existed only in her memory now, and if she lingered here much longer, she was afraid she'd start to doubt the truth of those memories. Beneath the scorching sun, she shivered.

Abruptly, she turned away. Rune wasn't here. If he was close, and knew she was here, he'd have come by now. "Yeah," she whispered derisively. "And then what?" Siaran opened her fingers, intending to let the little card fall to lie in the dust forever, but something stopped her and she pinched it tightly before it could slide all the way out of her grip. The tiny grooves beneath her fingers were smooth and regular, warm from her hand. She shoved the card into her pocket again and went back up the shallow slope, still limping a little on her right leg.

The car's engine sounded tinny and meaningless as Siaran started it up and put it into gear. She made a tight U-turn on the blacktop and headed back the way she'd come, toward civilized humanity and an attempt to fit it back into her life.

She had almost nothing to pack. She kept her mind as empty and light as her worldly possessions when she boarded the plane, determined not to think too much for fear she would crack. She slept most of the way home, and the little card in her pocket continued to broadcast its sophisticated, minute, and virtually undetectable signal into the planet's atmosphere, just as it had from the moment Rune had activated it and placed it into Siaran's boot.


	21. Wild Hunt

**Chapter 21 – Wild Hunt**

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_A male rabbit restlessly thumps the ground_

_A female rabbit shyly looks away_

_But when they run, how can you tell me_

_Which is the male, which is the female?_

- The Ballad of Mu Lan

Cormag McVitty, the caretaker, was sick to the teeth of women's idle talk. Bad enough that he had the upkeep of Ulster House and its twenty acres to look to, what with the sea wind blowing in to make his game leg stiffer than ever. April was a cold month this far north, and too early for the lads from the schools to come looking for summer work at the estate—those the golf courses didn't snap up on the way. Bad enough, aye, but whenever he came in for a spot of tea or to warm his hands at the fire, there was his daughter Mary and his two twitterheaded granddaughters beating their gums over the imminent arrival of the American woman.

Before he could duck out again, Cormag had to suffer the shrieks and giggles as the three women speculated what could bring such an odd tourist to their little corner of Scotland, just south of Wick and far north of Inverness, during such an inhospitable season. Someone had said that someone else had talked to a cousin who had a friend in America, and the friend had heard that their upcoming visitor was involved in some kind of fighting sport and had been part of a terrible disaster … Cormag lost interest.

With a snort, he banged his teacup onto the solid dark wood of the table. His granddaughters were fine girls, there was no denying it; upstanding modern lasses from a good Sutherland family. Cormag was as fond and proud of them as could be. But there was only so much feminine chatter a man could take. It didn't help that their mother, Mary, was as excited and flustered about their visitor as her daughters. Cormag shot her a meaningful look from beneath his thick eyebrows. She only smiled and shook her head, clearly ready to indulge and share in her offspring's featherbrained notions. He groaned as he stood, as much to drown out their gossip as to voice the pain his leg gave him.

"Ach, Granddad." Katherine, the elder girl, was there to support him at once. "You all righ'?" She had always been a kind child. Cormag patted her hand for a moment before he pushed it away.

"Aye, and busier 'n some, wi' no time to stand around jabberin'." His beady glance took them all in this time, but his shameless progeny only laughed.

"Oh Granddad, come on!" That was Lily, the younger girl, thirteen and golden-haired. "It's the most exciting thing that's happened here in just _forever_, and think, she's coming to stay with _us_! Why, they say she _killed_ someone!" She bounced happily in place at the thought of something so dramatic, and the usually more level-headed Katherine let out a breathless squeal.

"Oh, an' if that's so true, why's she comin' to stay a' Ulster, then?" Cormag took up his stick and hat and sidled toward the door. "She'd be rottin' in some American jail, wot?"

"_Granddad!_" Lily glared indulgently at him. "You are just no fun. Besides, she's _rich_, an' famous too—a fighter!"

"Hrrrmph." Cormag jammed his hat onto his head and stomped out into the wind, muttering that rich didn't matter a hoot so long as the tourists paid their room and board, and he'd never know what would possess a woman to be a prizefighter in the first place. The door slammed behind him, cutting off Mary's voice as she soothed Lily. The hedge still needed trimming, and three hours hence he'd have to go meet the wealthy American killer herself at Wick Airport.

He shook his head, imagining the badgering his womenfolk were sure to put the poor girl through at supper that night with no other guests in the house. Well, they'd show her proper Scottish hospitality or feel the end of his cudgel, so they would. Money was money, and too much of it these days went inland to the golf. The American's reservation had requested an indefinite stay if they had room, and Cormag would not have her—or her cash—driven out by a gaggle of pestering females.

Wick Airport was small, and the commuter flight bearing Ulster House's guest up from Edinburgh was less than half full. Even so, Cormag thought he would have recognized Siaran Moss during lunchtime in Heathrow. She was tall and slender, with long dark hair and a pale face in which her eyes seemed too large and dark. She walked with the proud grace of an athlete, but seemed drawn into herself somehow with suffering, aware of her environment but not really seeing it. Well, now, maybe there was something to what his girls had said.

He raised a gnarled hand and called her name as she came across the small terminal. She turned her head, paused, then came warily toward him. "Hello," she said, and after another small pause shook his offered hand. He was surprised that hers was nearly as callused as his. "You must be Cormag … McVeety?" She spoke with care, not loudly, as if choosing her words; her accent was clearly American.

"McVitty, lass. Pleasure. Have ye any bags?"

Siaran shook her head. "Just this." She shrugged one shoulder, over which she carried a brand-new mountaineering pack. "I can manage it, thank you," she added when Cormag held out his hand for it. She was perfectly polite, but she hadn't smiled yet.

"All set, then. This way." He turned, leaning on his stick, and let her out to the ancient Nissan. He'd parked right in front of the doors on the yellow, but nobody was going to care on a day like this. A strong wind was blowing out of the North Sea, bringing with it gusts of cold rain. Siaran didn't shiver, which earned her the tiniest mark of approval in Cormag's estimation.

She was silent during the half-hour drive to Ulster House, south of the bay on the coast, except for answering, "I'm not sure," when Cormag asked her if she'd worked out yet how long she'd like to stay. He'd noticed the strange scar on her forehead but forbore to mention it. If she didn't bring it up, well, neither would he. But it had a regular sort of look, as if she'd been branded with some peculiar design. Odd, that she neither explained it nor tried to hide it, though surely she knew people must be curious.

"Well," he answered, "There's room and enough, this time o' year. You stay as long as you like, Miss Moss."

She shot him a look that might have been gratitude, and said nothing more. Cormag didn't push it. She was his guest, and he liked solitude in any case. A man didn't have enough of it sometimes, not with a child and two grandchildren always at him to fix this leak, stop that hole, rest his legs before they fell off, did he want to die before his time?

Ulster House was an Edwardian mansion built on the ruins of a minor laird's castle, overlooking a long, gentle slope to the sea. North was a curving beach that sloped gradually up into low cliffs and a shallow cove; south was a stand of scrubby pine and beyond that, empty land for fifteen miles until the next village. The road that led east from the A99 was a narrow gravel lane bordered by low stone wall. The Romans had never come this far north; hadn't, in fact, had much stomach for Scotland's weather nor its wode-painted warriors. Even the Danes had not made much headway into Sutherland, and its people had been left to themselves for a long while.

Cormag's suspicions about supper were not ill-placed. He'd seen Siaran settled into the south tower in relative peace. She'd earned another mark of his respect by paying for three weeks in advance, unasked, in pounds sterling. He'd intended to put her in the central wing of the guest quarters because it would be easier for Mary to clean those rooms, but her payment earned her the spacious south tower without a second thought. Siaran had thanked him; he thought she was pleased with the suite, but it was difficult to read her. Then she had closed the door after promising to appear for supper at 6:30.

She was prompt, and Mary beamed at that, giving her father a covert nod of approval as she and the girls carried in gammon, brown bread, and green beans with generous helpings of home-cured bacon. Katherine had brewed her special cider and set out a steaming pitcher of it with the water and milk jugs. Siaran walked into this bustle, taller by a head than any of them, looking around at the warm kitchen with its worn but solid table, burnished copper cookware on wall hooks, and bundles of dried herbs tacked to the low ceiling beams. There was an air of penury about Ulster House with its simple furnishings and weather-beaten exterior, but it was balanced by fierce pride, orderliness, and a close family spirit.

For the first time, Siaran smiled. Lily and Katherine, pretty in the simple dresses their mother had made them wear, smiled tentatively back. Siaran was wearing well-tailored brown trousers and a cream-colored wool sweater; her hair was plaited back in a long French braid. She wore no makeup, but Lily, watching her, thought she was both beautiful and very sad. She would have been surprised to learn that her grandfather shared this opinion.

Siaran sat down with the small family, saying little, eating and listening to the north-Scottish brogue her ancestors had spoken. These were country folk, kind and humble, not unintelligent. Their food was good and their hospitality evident. She looked from face to face: the two girls, rosy with youth, their eyes sparkling with some secret delight; Mary, her copper hair going gray and pulled into a bun, plumper than her daughters and just as rosy; and Cormag with his weathered brown face and wise blue eyes, lame but whipcord-thin and strong even in old age. He'd taken off his cap to reveal a shock of thick white hair, and ate without saying anything, glancing around the table from time to time, his gaze lingering longest on Siaran.

She felt no kinship with any of them. The kitchen was warm, the laughter merry, the conversation light and full of life. But the cold knot in her solar plexus stayed determinedly where it was, where it had been every since the accident at Nationals. Really, it had been there ever since South Africa, but Siaran couldn't bear to think that far back.

Katherine, seated to her left, reached for another slice of bread and fixed Siaran with her bright gaze. "You seem so quiet and nice," she said forthrightly. "It's not what I expected at all."

Silence fell over the table; Siaran felt the tension at once, heard the hiss of someone's indrawn breath. Katherine went scarlet and lowered her eyes quickly to her plate, suddenly busy tearing her bread into small bits. She peeked up to see if Siaran was still watching her, and bit her lip when she saw that she was.

Siaran forced a smile. "What do you mean?" Her voice was gentle.

It was Lily, across from her, who answered, blithe and happy as a bird. She alone had missed the sudden change in atmosphere at the table. "She _means_, we didn't expect you to be so normal, you killing that girl and all."

Siaran stared at her for the space of a heartbeat. Then Cormag's cudgel came down across the table with a crack, making everyone jump. "_That's enough_!" he thundered, breathing hard, glaring between his granddaughters. "This is a table for civil folk, not silly lassies full of hurtful gossip. Miss Moss is our _guest_. Lily, Katherine—apologize an' leave this table."

"No," said Siaran quietly, and looked levelly at Cormag until he subsided back into his chair, breathing heavily. "It's all right. I didn't know—" She shook her head. "You're bound to be curious, so I might as well tell you. That way, no more gossip, right?" Her voice was as gentle as before, but there was no trace of a smile on her face. She took a long breath and pushed back her plate. Lily and Katherine looked shamefaced, their mother mortified, and Cormag toweringly angry; but all of them were riveted on her.

She didn't want that. There had been enough bad press and sensationalism over the thing in the first place; best to give these people the bare bones and leave it alone, which is all she wanted in the first place. "Last month," she said, "I fought in the U.S. National Championships for Tae Kwon Do. It's a martial art—you know, kicking and punching, a fighting art from Korea." They nodded; Siaran continued. "It can be very dangerous. I've had bones broken before doing it, sometimes badly." She paused. "I'm telling you that so you understand accidents can happen, even with professional competitors. And one did, to me. I made it to the gold medal round. The girl I was fighting was very good, very strong."

Siaran paused and looked down at her own plate. Her hands rested on the tabletop, pale and still. "Our score was tied going into the third round. She came in low, trying to get inside my reach, just as I was bringing up my leg to kick. The edge of my foot caught her in the throat, and it … she died."

In the silence that followed, Siaran carefully pushed back her chair and stood. "Please excuse me," she said evenly. "I'm going to get some air."

Cormag found her half an hour later at the place where the winter-brittle sedge gave way to sand. She stood motionless in the twilight, her face turned toward the windswept sea. The waves rushed ceaselessly toward the shore, breaking far out on the black rock below the surface and foaming onto the pale sand. The rain had stopped, but it was no less cold.

He hadn't wanted to come out here at all, shouting at Mary that the lass had been through enough, for God's sake, she needed to be left in whatever peace she could salvage. But the girls were hysterical with the guilt of hindsight, and Mary was certain that Siaran had walked straight into the sea to drown herself. So in the end the women had badgered Cormag into going out to convey apologies and check to see that she was all right. To himself, he admitted he'd come out as much to get away from the histrionics. He seemed to do that a lot, lately. Maybe he finally was getting old, old in spirit.

Siaran had not brought a jacket with her, but she didn't seem to feel the bite of winter that still laced the Scottish dusk. Clouds scudded overhead, lit by the last traces of sunset and a waxing moon shining fitfully behind them. White foam broke on the restless black waves; it was never silent here, even when the world was quiet.

"You all right, lass?"

Siaran didn't move or speak for a long time. Cormag stood a few feet from her, leaning on his stick, looking out at the waves. Finally, she turned her head toward the old Scot. "I'm sorry. It would have been easier if you hadn't already known." She smiled, but it was mirthless, little more than lips stretching back from her teeth. "I'd never have thought anyone up here would have heard about that at all."

"Ach, well." Cormag snorted. "My girls, they want to know everything there is." He gestured with one hand at the darkening sky. "You come in out o' season, next thing ye know they're on the bleedin' internet learnin' all they can about ye." He shook his head. "Youth's not learned yet there's enough excitement an' trouble in life without lookin' for more."

"It's all right."

"No," he said, "It ain't, lass. But they'll not bother ye again, I'll see to it. They're sorry as it is, now they've heard the tale."

Watching her profile in silver and shadow, he saw her face contract as though in pain. "I came here to get away from it," she answered, but Cormag didn't think she was talking to him. She laughed, soft and humorless, the sound lost in the suck and sigh of the waves.

Cormag noticed she was holding something, a little flat dark square, rubbing it back and forth between her fingers. She said nothing, and he didn't ask, and after a while he turned and limped back to the mansion and heard her following quietly behind.

Miracle of miracles, his granddaughters behaved themselves like saints at breakfast. Siaran tried to help with the washing up and it was Lily who refused with charming good manners, saying that was not a guests's chore and suggesting she take a walk along the coast as it was a fine morning, not too cold with the sun shining as it hadn't done in days.

Cormag, clearing sea wrack and piling driftwood up on the beach to put by for firewood, saw Siaran several hours later wander down from the north cove with her knuckles bloody and raw. She walked with her head down, her body bent wearily against the wind, and only nodded to him when she passed. He leaned thoughtfully on his stick, chewing over what she'd said and what she hadn't in the past day. Then he went into the barn, packed an empty burlap sack with sawdust, and strung it from one of the rafters with a strong length of rope.

Siaran went out to the beach again after supper that night, this time wrapped in an anorak. Cormag was already there, taking his usual his final pipe of the night. He nodded to Siaran as she came up beside him. The embers lit his face with a devilish glow, and the tobacco smoke smelled full and sweet. They stood without speaking, Cormag puffing contentedly on his pipe, Siaran again rubbing and rubbing that little square of plastic between her fingers.

"Might be there's somethin' in t'barn that'll be easier on yon knuckles than rock or tree," Cormag said as he sucked down the last of the smoke. He nodded courteously to her and went back inside.

Siaran hit the improvised punching bag the next day, and the next. Lily and Katherine sometimes came out to the barn to watch, but Mary always shooed them back inside before long, leaving Siaran to work out her feelings in solitude. She went at the bag for hours, and when on the third day she burst the burlap and sent sawdust everywhere, Cormag replaced it, this time doubling up the sacks.

It was the first time he'd heard her laugh, and he chuckled too, to see her standing there bent over with her hands on her knees, covered head to heels in sawdust. She wore a sleeveless white top over loose black pants, and even under the sawdust Cormag could see the white scars that crisscrossed her arms and shoulders. He was as ignorant as any seaman about the Oriental martial arts, but he could bet she hadn't gotten those scars in any sparring ring. Even prizefighters didn't have scars like that. She looked like she'd been got at by a wild animal.

That night he had the beach to himself. It was raining again, but his pipe glowed merrily under the plastic hood of his mackintosh. He was tamping the embers and nearly swallowed a bellyful of smoke in surprise when he felt a hand on his shoulder.

Coughing and spluttering, he turned to see Ulster House's lone guest standing there, smiling a little through the rain and darkness. "Just wanted to say thanks, Cormag," she called above the downpour.

"An' apologize to an old man for scaring him half to his death, I expect," he told her sourly, but grinned back at her anyway through his whiskers. "What ye thank me for, lass?"

"For the punching bag. It was—thoughtful."

She turned and ran back through the rain, and Cormag had the strangest notion that she'd had a hard time thanking him, as if she'd forgotten how.

A heavy storm blew in overnight, and the next day the house woke to gale winds that drove the rain like nails against the windows. Even the hot breakfast of black pudding, eggs, and rashers couldn't lift the weight of the storm. Thunder shook the house, and sea and sky boiled with rain. Katherine and Lily cleared the table and set about stoking fires in every room of the house. Mary busied herself preparing a roast; it was Sunday, but the lane would be flooded by now, making the ten-mile drive to church impossible. Mary contented herself with the Sunday mass on the small radio on the kitchen sideboard. Cormag stalked in and out of the lean-to shed, bringing more wood in and shoveling ash out.

Siaran took a cup of tea and wandered alone into the drawing room, which had new French doors that faced the sea. The fire was already going in here, so she sank into a comfortable burgundy armchair to sip her tea and watch the storm lash the North Sea into a frenzy of huge gray waves and churning whitecaps.

The room was warm, the only sound the crackle of the fire at her back and the dull roar of the storm outside. Sometimes, the gale shriek came through when a gust caught the eaves from below and set the walls shaking and windows rattling. Siaran grew drowsy and set her mug down on the floor, then sank deeper into the comfortable chair. Somewhere in the house, she could hear the low murmur of women's voices, interspersed at times by Cormag's rougher brogue. Almost, she felt, she could be at peace.

Cormag stamped into the room. His heavy boots startled her out of a half doze and she rose, turning in her chair. The old man dumped a load of firewood onto the hearth and began adding logs one by one, arranging them expertly with a poker.

"Hello," Siaran said to his back.

Cormag jumped, then turned and saw her; his face fell in chagrin. "Ach, lass. I dinnae see ye." He grinned ruefully and rubbed one soot-blackened hand across the gray whiskers on his chin. "But I expect I scared you more'n you scared me, comin' in makin' all this racket. Sorry."

He limped over to the French doors; Siaran bent down to pick up her mug and went to join him. "This is some storm," she remarked.

Cormag looked sideways at her. "The legends say that on a day like this the Wild Hunt comes, and it's best not to look outside often, else ye might see 'em."

Siaran sipped her tea. It had gone cold, and she grimaced.

Cormag, misunderstanding her expression, sighed and shook his head. "Ah, but I forget meself. I'm only an old man, and ye're not interested in old Scottish ghosts, o' course."

"Oh, no," said Siaran, and stopped him from going with a hand on his wool-clad arm. There was a strange expression on her face: very alert, as if she'd just come fully awake for the first time since she'd arrived. She was so still and intent that Cormag found it disturbing to meet her gaze. But she spoke calmly. "That's not it; my tea's cold is all. Please … I'd like to hear about the Wild Hunt." She blinked and took a step back, as if aware of her sudden intensity and trying to cover it. "My, um, my family comes from this part of Scotland, did I ever tell you? Well, further inland, but north of Inverness somewhere."

Cormag nodded. "And that's why ye chose Ulster to visit, is it?"

She hesitated. "Partly. And partly because...well..." she gestured around, indicating the big empty house, the lonely patch of ground it sat on.

Cormag's mouth split in a near-toothless grin of understanding. "Because we're in a fine patch o' nowhere, and that's as good a place as any fer forgettin'." But he could tell she was uncomfortable, so he hollered over his shoulder for Lily or Katherine to bring some tea and continued with his tale.

"The Wild Hunt," he said, his brogue softening and taking on the lilt of a born storyteller, "Was a group o' faerie huntsmen that rode across the skies and brought thunder and rain in their wake." Lightning flashed over the sea, dazzling Siaran's eyes, but she didn't blink. She hardly even breathed. "They could be seen anywhere they chose to go—forests, mountains, countryside—but they preferred the coast, for then they could hunt on sea or land, and catch up any lost folk they found to join 'em."

Lily came in with a china teapot, dipped a small curtsy to Siaran, and refilled her cup. She giggled at Cormag. "Granddad harassing you with one of his tales of the old country?"

Siaran thanked her and said she didn't mind; it was a good day for stories. Lily could hardly argue with that but trotted off without staying to hear the rest. Cormag waved a scornful hand in his granddaughter's wake. "Oh, her. Her folk tales are all about movie stars and pop singers. Now then, lass, where was I?"

"The Wild Hunt was taking people to join them." She drank her tea, her blue-gray eyes fixed on the storm, the expression in them far away and reflecting the chaos outside.

"Oh yes. Well, now. Any mortal who got in their path had his soul ripped away to join the Hunt, and when he could nae keep up any longer, he was sent to the land of the dead. No mortal could ride with the Hunt for long, ye see. They were too fierce and deadly, an' they could outrun anythin' that runs." Cormag paused and gripped the head of his cudgel. "It was said that Wild Edric could even pull free the spirits of sleepers to join the Hunt, so even those in their beds weren't safe if he had a mind to take them."

Siaran blinked and turned away from the wild scenery. "Wild Edric? Who was he?"

"He led the Hunt. A mighty warrior he was; even the king of Faerie would nae tangle with the likes o' him. There are masks of his face still, aye, fearsome things."

"What did he look like?" Siaran's voice was almost a whisper. Cormag looked at her, and saw in her face a thing that he didn't understand but that made his spine go cold all the same. He forgot himself for a moment and stared at her. "Cormag?"

"He—" Cormag made a small sound, a quick prayer in Gaelic, then looked out at the raging storm himself. "He was terrible and wonderful, lass. Taller than any mortal man, twice as broad, with wondrous fair armor and a hunting pike tipped in adamant." He took a deep breath. Siaran was riveted, and so was he; he couldn't remember ever telling this story with such animation, nor feeling such strange fear as he did. It was as if the Wild Hunt were out there right now, riding through the storm.

"Wild Edric, he had a horned head like a ram's, only the horns were many and much shorter, ye ken? Long black skeins o' fur grew out of those horns, strung with beads an' bones from those the Hunt took. An' his face … " Cormag glanced at Siaran again and saw her watching him with the same remote intensity, her own face pale and strange.

"His eyes were red, hidden behind a gray knight's visor, but glowin' like the devil's own. His mouth was split, with fangs outside an' inside, an' when he smiled, Wild Edric, it would drive men mad with fear. His laugh was a death rattle, an' if he wanted ye for the Hunt, nothin' ye could do would stop him takin' ye." Cormag took another long breath. "An' that's why it's bad luck even now to stare too long into th' storm. The Wild Hunt makes it, an' Wild Edric leads the charge."

There was a sheen of sweat on Siaran's pale forehead. She reached out blindly and set her cup down on a small side table with a faint thunk. Then she straightened up and looked past Cormag, unseeing, her eyes reflecting the heavy clouds that roiled low in the sky.

"It almost seems," said Cormag, still half-caught in the power of legend, "That maybe ye've seen the Wild Hunt afore, lass."

Siaran was motionless. "I rode with them," she answered, so softly that Cormag wasn't sure he'd heard it. He wasn't even sure why he'd said what he had, or on what level he meant it. She raised her fingertips to her forehead, tracing the scar there. She seemed unaware that he was watching, or even in the same room. With her lost wild eyes, cloaked in silence and pain, she seemed a changeling, not entirely human. It wasn't the first time Cormag had thought so, but it disturbed him now as it hadn't before.

He coughed and stretched his back. "Well, lass," he said, hearing the uneasiness in his voice but unable to mask it beneath forced cheer. "This old man's bored ye long enough. Time I went back to be henpecked into doing more chores."

Siaran nodded absently, still looking into the distance. Cormag hesitated, then left the room, and she was alone again.

Something buzzed sharply against her leg, making her jump and let out a startled hiss. Siaran shook away the lingering spell of Cormag's too-literal story and dug into her jeans, frowning. She had no cell phone reception here, or so she thought.

The only thing in her pocket was the grooved plastic card. Siaran pulled it free with a sense of foreboding and stared at it. Its surface was agitated, flashing red and black in a nonsense pattern beneath the veneered-looking surface. She rubbed her thumb across it and it vibrated again; she nearly dropped it in surprise.

Her heart went to her mouth and her head felt like a great weight on her neck suddenly as she struggled to lift her head, hoping without daring to hope, fearing what she might see, fearing worse that she'd see nothing at all. She got her head up at last and nearly dropped it again when she saw only the storm. Heavy rainclouds poured out rain, the wind blurred water in running sheets against the windows and tossed the waves into a deadly heaving mass. Then, over the sea and diffuse through the cloud cover, came a flash of blue-white light. Siaran waited. The flash came again, lower and to the right, toward the wind-lashed stand of pine.

She opened the French doors and walked out into the storm.

The wind and rain hit her, making her gasp and bend against their fury. Water drove against her skin and prickled like ice. Within a few steps, her jeans and hoody were soaked, her running shoes squelching. Lightning flashed again over the sea, and thunder cracked in its wake, shaking the earth. The light flashed over the trees, sank out of the clouds in a dark gray predatory shape with blue winking along its sides, and descended into the small wood. Siaran began to run.

The ramp was already down when she reached the dubious shelter of the trees. It was what she remembered, _exactly_ what she remembered, it hadn't been a dream after all, she'd known it hadn't, there just had been no other way to reconcile where she'd been with where she was now. She had tried to fit in, to return to her old life, had killed on the sparring floor as she had killed in the jungle, only by accident then, too strong for frail human flesh. They had made her too strong. _He _had made her too strong.

She realized she was babbling and forced her mind to focus. She was gasping from the sprint through the teeth of the storm, and couldn't breathe at all now seeing the ship inside the grove, its ramp down, nothing moving inside, everything moving outside. The trees groaned and swayed in the wind, the wind screamed, and water was everywhere. The uncertainty was terrible, and the hope was worse.

Mist billowed up there in the cargo hold. It swirled and shifted around a tenuous dark form that grew and solidified and finally stepped clear.

Rune came down the ramp.

He was as tall and gracefully powerful as she remembered. He wore full armor, polished and gleaming dully in the darkness under the trees and clouds. His claw-tipped hands were empty and open, ready to attack if necessary; twin wristblade sheaths perched on both forearms. His corded hair was smooth and gleaming, set with polished metal beads, and the helmet set against his snub-horned skull was the same one she remembered, basic yet fierce, concealing the face but revealing the pure warrior's soul in this being she knew so little and so well.

She wanted to scream, cry, fall down and beat the ground with her fists and heels, dance, run, jump a mile into the air. She thought she would burst with the need to move, but all she could do was stand there and stare.

Rune stopped at the base of the ramp and regarded her, tilting his head to one side. His right arm looked whole and healed; he raised it toward his forehead in the old familiar gesture and took another step, and was set back suddenly on his heels as a hundred and twenty pounds of quivering bone and muscle crashed into his midsection and wrapped itself around him like the tail of a _kainde amedha_ in its facehugging stage.

She was making strange muffled noises, Siaran, her face mashed against his skin beneath the webbing, between the chest protectors that depended from his shoulder plates. Startled, Rune bent his head, cord-hair brushing and blending with her own dark tangles. Below the noise of the storm, he could hear that she was saying his name, over and over, on a sob of breath.

He did not quite understand this human custom; it smacked of a need to take strength from another's touch and he was not at all sure he approved. However, he had made a pledge on the other side of this blue-green world to learn from her, and he would honor that pledge.

Slowly, because it felt so strange, Rune brought up arms like tree-trunks and crossed them across Siaran's back, enfolding her, careful not to crush. Her body was very warm, even at its naturally cooler temperature. To his immense surprise, he found that with the contact, he again experienced the strange rush of pride and affection, coupled with a renewed fascination for this unusual human who had won the right to fight beside him.

He lowered his head further, until his flat bony chin brushed the top of her head. "You did not wait for me, Yeyin-de," he told her in his own tongue. "So I came for you."

Siaran, her voice muffled against the thick yellow skin of his abdomen, said, "You came back."

Rune clicked his mandibles in amusement and growled, exerting gentle pressure to push her away and place the proper respectful distance between them. Only in sparring, killing, or mating would a yautja get that close to another living thing. Breaking that custom was something he could only tolerate for a short time without becoming agitated. He had broken one commandment and it had led to his exile as a Bad Blood. It was beyond him to start breaking the rest all at once.

There would be time enough for breaking old customs and forging new ones, if she was willing.

Siaran unwound herself and stepped back, blinking up at him through the rain. Her face was flushed. She licked her lips and tasted salt. "Why did you come back?"

Rune tilted his head, his ornamental beads clinking dully. Yes, he had missed her. Even her tendency to continually overlook the obvious was almost appealing right now.

"To take you hunting, brrrave one," he told her.

Siaran started to smile. Then her face clouded, and she took a step back. "But—what about your people? You're an exile. Won't they look for you, hunt you—us—again?"

Rune growled, very softly. Rain streamed from his armor, pinging off it. A fine mist rose from his thermal suit as it adjusted for the cold, making him seem both insubstantial and much larger than life. "Siarrran." He spoke the way he had so often on the training floor, correcting her technique, teaching her a new way. "It took me long to heal, and then to find the ship. Then it took longerrr to fix it ssso that it could not be..." He paused, choosing the right word from his limited vocabulary. "Tracked." He brushed the scar on her forehead. "There arrre many placesss we can go."

Siaran's face, beneath water and tears, reflected an agony of hope and doubt. "Are you sure—are you sure you want me to go with you?"

Rune's huge hand dropped from her forehead to her shoulder. He shook her affectionately; the force of it rattled her teeth. "You said once that we werre a trribe. You were rrright. Do not forget, little one, it wasss I who marked you." He growled at her again, louder this time.

Siaran's strange flat mouth curved upward in what he knew was pleasure. Rune saw no doubt in her face now, so he let go of her and raised his hand, palm flat upward with fingers spread, to forestall her. "Think. If you go with me, you will not have the company of yourrr own kind." He knew too well how she might feel about that, because it had been thrust upon him. At least he could offer her the choice. "You would have the honorrr of dying in the hunt insstead. And we would hunt togetherr until the darrk warriorr claimss usss."

He did not insult her by telling her it would be difficult. He had come back because he had realized it would bring him no shame to hunt with her for the rest of her life, should she choose it. He did not know if she would. If she did, and if they survived long enough to make planetfall on a new world that supported life, then maybe he would choose to go with the dark god when Siaran did. Then he could accompany her into the eternal hunt-beyond-life, where strength of body meant far less than strength of spirit. Maybe, before that happened, he would even teach her his true name.

First, though, she had to choose. And in any case it was pointless to speculate on an uncertain future.

"I understand," Siaran whispered, and shivered. She was soaking wet and very cold. She was also still smiling. "I don't belong here anymore, Rune. I tried to, but I couldn't. And now," she broke off and glanced off to her right, where the lights from Ulster House shone faintly through the black trunks and curtains of rain. When she looked back up at him, her face was radiant. "Yes. I'll go with you."

She held up the little card, which was still flashing red and black, red and black. Drops of rain glistened on its surface.

Rune thrummed low in his throat, pleased, and took it from her. "I am glad you kept the trrracking device. It would have taken me much longerrr to find you without it." He shook himself and stamped his feet, noticed her shivering for the first time. "Come. Let us be gone frrrom this place and its weatherrr."

"Hey." She held up a warning finger, though it trembled a little and her teeth chattered from the cold. "My ancestors came from here, buddy. No disrespecting them."

Rune glanced around at the wind-whipped pines and the stormy North Sea. "I think," he finally said, "That you mussst have been lying when you told me they all battled naked."

"We're tougher than we look," Siaran told him, though her lips were nearly blue now.

"_Hulij-bpe,_" Rune said. "Crazy, then." He touched one taloned finger to the side of his head.

Siaran laughed. "Oh, that's for sure. I just said I'd go with you, didn't I? Crazy." She looked toward the house again. "Rune, you won't leave without me, will you? There's something I have to take care of there, and I want my things."

Rune chuffed. "I hope your...cloth?...iss many. We may not find a verrry hosspitable world, at firssst."

"I don't think it'll matter _what_ world we find," she called, and turned to run back through the trees. The truth of her words dawned on her as she ran, pushing herself faster, thinking ahead to what she had to do before she could get back to the ship, to Rune, to the rest of her life. Rune wasn't human, and that could prove difficult sometimes; it already had. But he lived and breathed his code of honor instead of using it as a prop against weakness or a front against duplicity. As she flung open the French doors, the thought struck her that even though Rune had given her a choice, she didn't really have one at all.

She skidded through the empty drawing room and raced up the stairs to the South Tower three at a time, trailing wet footprints. She threw everything she'd brought with her into her pack. As she buckled the shoulder and lumbar straps, she remembered another time and place, easing a different pack on over the torn flesh on her hip where the serpent-bug had clawed her and trotting off after an alien creature through the desert at night to an unknown future.

Smiling, she went light-footed and quick down the stairs again and paused in the drawing room long enough to scribble something on the pad beside the telephone and leave it with the rest of her cash. She wouldn't need it anymore, and it seemed like Cormag's family and Ulster House could use it. She owed them that at least.

Then she was out the doors, closing them quietly behind her. She ran through the rain, toward the pines, and saw Rune's powerful dark shape half-camouflaged against the trunks, where he had come to watch for her return.

Her breath hitched in her throat at the sight, and she rocketed across the last stretch of open ground. She'd been ludicrously afraid that she'd suddenly wake up and find the whole thing a dream, or worse, come out to the trees to find that Rune had left without her. But he was there, huge and solid and reassuring. Dizzy with relief, Siaran wondered whether he'd pick her up if she collapsed right there.

Pride wouldn't let her take that any further than speculation. She reached the pines, and Rune fell into stride with her. They ran side by side to the ship, their feet first squelching on wet loam, then pounding up the metal grate. They stopped inside the empty cargo hold. Rune pressed the sequence of controls on the wall panel to close the ramp behind them.

Siaran looked up at him, seeing vast unknown danger in his familiar alienness. Despite that, she felt whole and aware, alive in a way she hadn't been since waking up alone in that sweat-soaked hospital bed. Never again. She might die of fever from some alien parasite, get ripped apart by a prey too strong for her to take, or go peacefully in her sleep at old age. Until that happened, she would keep company with this strange, fierce being who had met her so unexpectedly and altered her so completely.

The hydraulics hissed and the floor shuddered once as the ramp sealed shut. Rune tilted his great head to regard her, and Siaran smiled. She was home.

Cormag came down the hall and frowned at the puddles on the scrubbed flagstone floor. "Now who on earth," he muttered under his breath, and stumped into the drawing room in search of the culprit. If one of those girls had been out in the rain, he'd skin her alive.

He came up short when he saw the multicolored bills stuck under the telephone pad. Squinting in the gloom, he groped out and found the light switch. He picked up the pad and the neat stack of money beneath; licking his thumb, he counted out more than three thousand pounds. Then he looked at the pad. The paper was wrinkled with dampness, the ink smeared with rainwater but still legible. In a hurried scrawl, Siaran had written:

"Cormag—I'm going with Wild Edric, where I belong. Thank you for your hospitality, and for showing me the way."

Money and note in hand, Cormag limped to the French doors. As he peered out, he heard a booming roll from the south, louder than ordinary thunder, woven together with a higher note of power like the winding of a vast hunting horn. He opened the door and let the wind and rain blow in. Through the dark stand of pine, he saw flashes of blue light. A great dark hooded shape rose above the trees a moment later and disappeared up into the clouds. The light flared once more and was gone. Its farewell note faded until all he could hear was the storm.

Cormag shut the door and walked slowly to the fire. He cast the handwritten note onto the flames and, leaning heavily on his cudgel, watched the paper curl and blacken to ash. Then he made his way back through the old house to tell his daughter and her daughters that their guest had departed.

End

* * *

_Final Note: _To everyone who has reviewed, commented, praised, questioned, or criticized this story, thank you. It sounds cliché to say that without all your feedback this piece wouldn't be what it is, but that doesn't make it any less true. On the grand scale of things, I don't know if this story's any good. What I do know, beyond doubt, is that it's much, much better than it would have been if I'd written it without receiving any input.

It's been a great pleasure to discover new friends in the course of writing. **Syverasazyn** and I shared many moments of drunken hilarity speculating on our own and each other's stories, though I suspect I got far more inspiration from her than she did from me. I eagerly wait for the rest of "The Adventures of Wild Dog," even (and especially) if it evolves into Doctor Who-like perpetuity. **Shay-n-Sweet Pea Piratess** awed me with her incisive questions and her honesty, and while I live in terror of her flames, I'm pleased that she hasn't yet seen fit to offer me up to the pyre. **Mirari1** is my hero when it comes to elegant prose and character-revealing dialogue; I am but a child on the knee of her talent, and her Warcraft fic, "Hell for the Company," is beyond awesome. I owe **Royal Frog **a tremendous debt of fandom and tolerance; she loved my story and told me so, kindly allowed me free rein with recommended reading, and drew for me a gorgeous fan art of Siaran and Rune during their first sparring face-off. It's on her dA account, which is linked through her profile. She is remarkable not just in her own writing, but in making the intangibility of words into visual art. I envy such ability.

I owe a lot of this final chapter to Adam, out there in the real world. Some things aren't meant to be, but that can't stop imagination. The story as a whole I owe to everyone on this site who has read and written to me about it. You guys have too many stories I haven't had time to check out, and that's been an uncomfortable sliver in my mind. Now that this one's done, I get to take a break and catch up on my fanfic reading, which I've been looking forward to for months. Be seeing you.


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